Micro Niche Mastery

Welcome to the eighth episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.

Our guest for today is Evelyn Weiss, a coach and a digital marketer who helps eCommerce business owners, coaches & course creators to grow with funnels & Facebook Ads.

Are you having a problem niching down? Evelyn had too. Listen to Evelyn’s ‘zero to thousand’ story to find your micro-niche. 

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Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro-niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, his membership sites serve hundreds of people from a micro-niche that is smaller than 5,000 people worldwide, Ziv Raviv.

Zivi:

Hello, and welcome Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. Today, I have the pleasure to interview Evelyn. Evelyn has a vast experience in creating funnels and helping businesses grow through paid advertisement on Facebook. She has 10 years of experience and have created a turnover of $30 million for her clients. And she eat the process of being really good in understanding funnels and ads and advertisement on Facebook. She has started her own business and have went through an entire roller coaster going from making $500,000 a year down to doing 50 and going up all the way to 150 and keep changing and trying to find your own micro niche. Evelyn Weiss thank you so much for being here. Hi, how are you?

Evelyn:

I’m good. It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Zivi:

So first, before we start talking about your journey, I just want to say, I noticed your expertise on funnels on Facebook ads, but just, you know, consuming some of your YouTube channel content and looking through like your posts on Facebook groups that I was a part of, and it was just an immediate click, another standing for my sided, man, Evelyn figured that out funnels. She really knows her thing. And it was because of your own knowledge that we’ve started to create like a self-liquidating offer that was making us now he’s already profitable. It’s really amazing how, how knowledgeable you are with funnels and the 30 million turnover is mind blowing. Tell me a little bit about, what’s your point of view with like, how do you look back into your own journey and the topic of niching down?

Evelyn:

I think niching down is so interesting because in the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I couldn’t become an entrepreneur. I was studying marketing and one of my professors asked me if I can help him out at that time, SEO and Facebook Ads. I was on the side of the study. So I would study on the weekend working full-time for a jewelry company that had an online shop and I would teach everything myself. So I was completely in on the marketing. I had two amazing pulses, they were twins and they just gave me the chance to learn these things. And yeah, when I was studying, I realized that there’s a lot of demand for this online marketing things for Facebook ads. It was kind of new. And because my former boss has allowed me to play with budget and to figure these things out, I somehow became an expert in that and yeah, got hired and then had to found a company to be able to invoice my clients.

And it turned into building backsides and basically being the online girl for everything and for everyone. So people even asked me how they can connect the printer to the computer. So it was like, this girl knows online tech kind of, and somehow she managed to get a sale. So we wouldn’t tire. And that was back like six years ago, nine, I would say it was still a little bit of a different world online. It was not as professionalized as it is these days. And also want to say my or my country of origin is Austria. So compared to the United States, I think we’re a bit behind when it comes to e-commerce and digital marketing, but it was good enough for that time. And somehow I never thought about niching. It was just, I was just doing for others, what I was already doing and while solving problems, I learned more and I just kept adding solutions to my repertoire of how I can help people.

Evelyn:

So this turned out to be marketing and yeah, consultancy for, I also did websites and all kinds of stuff. And then one day I got offered a share in a project at that time I was head of marketing and e-commerce for Austria’s biggest Stanford wholesaler. So I was also kind of climbing corporate ladder while having my business was just flowing really well together. And it was an e-commerce project and it completely exploded. So I fought, I found my niche in e-commerce then, but I didn’t realize that there’s a second layer to niching down. So, so one part of niching down is knowledge and focusing on the problems that you already can solve and just expanding on this repertoire because it’s such a natural flow. And once people make progress with you and they trust you, it’s natural, that more business will come to you. So I was basically, I was never advertising. I didn’t have a website. I got so much referrals that I couldn’t handle that. And then even outsource said it kind of service arbitrage. It’s 300 websites in one summer, just outsourcing to a team in India, making a cuts up all kinds of crazy things that come with just helping people to solve problems. So it was beautiful and I never had to worry about finding clients or making money, but that that’s the problem solution part was already working really well for me, without me constantly knowing it. And then there was the second layer that had overlooked. And this is that if you want to work with people, long-term customers, clients, and you also have to make sure that they are a good fit when it comes to your validate, your values and how you want to do business. So I had a major issue with how employees were treated that the business was seen as just a short-term cash cow.

Evelyn:

There was no intention of building something that is long-term sustainable. It was just, you know, getting profits out of the company as soon as possible. And that’s not aligned with who I am. I love building something up. I love the community aspect that we had there in the company with the employees. And yeah, it just didn’t feel right to, it was almost feeling like exploiting them, although everyone was paid for it, but it just didn’t resonate with me. So I took a pay after we lost our biggest client, I took a pale and I went to Canada and I started over again with an advertising agency specializing in Facebook ads because I really felt like, okay, this is, this is what comes naturally to me, the whole messaging part. I really am an expert in that. So that was kind of the low hanging fruit, but I left my network behind and without my network and the stream, I couldn’t find new customers fast.

Evelyn:

So I made a mistake and I wanted to solve everyone’s problem. I wanted to run ads for everyone that wants to run ads and Facebook ads of course evolved. Also since I started to run them first, 10 years ago, and there are so many micro niches now, so you have to be, if you run Facebook ads for a dentist, it’s a completely different game than you’re running Facebook ads for local restaurant. Then you’re running Facebook ads for e-commerce or you’re running ads for a coach, or you’re running ads for questions for yourself. There’s so many micro niches and what has become more important than the traffic part is the funnel part. So customer acquisition costs keep rising and only if you have a good funnel in place that doesn’t only focus on the front end, but especially on the back end and helps you to acquire this customer lifetime value fast.

Evelyn:

I would say within your first half year, you should have a substantial amount acquired. Then it will be really hard for you these days to survive. So that was my biggest mistake was not niching down. And then if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one, I went into price floor. I went on the typical platforms to get clients, just undercutting myself overworking. And the first line would say, oh, and can you also do our social media content? And can you also build our website? And can you also write our emails? I would say yes, yes, yes, of course. And of course you’re not a specialist in everything. So I was also, you can’t be good at everything. So I realized that, and the first thing I thought was it was a problem of the agency. I didn’t understand that I had a niching problem. I felt I had the problem that I’m a service provider. So I thought I want to transition into coaching where I can leverage my time a little bit smarter and where I can help people on scale, which you actually can. But if you don’t niche down, you end up in same bucket

Ziv:

Just to clarify, basically you got to experience getting results on Facebook ads and funnels. And do you, you’ve noticed that as Facebook girls and matures as a platform and these days it’s very mature and it’s started to go through like a professionalization phase where people need to be professional to use it. There’s like very Micro specific niches in, within paid advertisement. And when you say yes to everything, yes, I can build your funnel and the write content, add to social media and fix your painter connection. Then you don’t pay a lot of transformation for people. You just water down your, your efficiency. And when you focus on the stuff that you’re really good at, which, which is funny, little ties meant for specific thing, you, you actually provide more value. So what happened next? Once you realized that you, you have a niching problem, and it’s not about the business model of being an agency versus being a course creator or a coach, what happened next?

Evelyn:

So to be very honest, I didn’t understand that that time that I had an niching  problem, I just knew I wanted to transition into putting people, but I’m a new coach in that basically don’t have any proof. I can show that I’m able to run Facebook ads, but I can show that I am able to get people results coaching. So what I did was there was like a little trick that I leveraged a thing that I kind of discovered when I fought the first fight that I had was I want to grow a community and an audience around my brand fast. And I realized that the fastest way to grow a community is to have a Facebook group. And then I thought, okay, I want to use my ad skills to grow the group faster and up until this point, what everyone was doing. And I really think that I disrupted the industry there a little bit, what everyone was doing was they would send people because you can’t advertise to Facebook to grow your Facebook group directly.

Evelyn:

They would send people through a bridge page to their Facebook group, which would create cost per group member of 10 to $20. So only if you have a high ticket coaching offer, that really makes sense for your business. But I also didn’t feel like I am a high ticket coach yet because I strongly believe that you have to be able to deliver on the value that just didn’t have the confidence yet. So I found a much cheaper way, and I was getting group members for below $2 using a lead ad approach, everything happening on Facebook. And basically what I did was I created a living case study with the Facebook group, showing people live, how I grew it to a thousand members keep talking about, look, this is what I’m doing here. And now you’re all here. Now I can show you how this actually works. And that was building that was creating a lot of momentum for me and a lot of trust, because I think also because I did it. So in a sense, without knowing the coaching so much, I think he was just refreshing for people to see someone walk their talk basically, and have this truth. And I was not out there on the Lamborghini telling them I help you to get to six and seven figures fast. I was basically just telling them, if you want to grow a Facebook group, this is how it works. And so

Ziv:

This is a very meta it’s like you’ve created a Facebook group that teaches you how to create a Facebook group through Facebook ads. And then you were doing Facebook ads and showing them what you’re doing and growing as a result, and people could go in and see how they can create Facebook groups for relatively low, a low budget. And like, did you, how soon did you know that your system actually works?

Evelyn:

So the first thing I knew is I have to have a strategic lead magnet that just talks to my ideal clients and my ideal clients were okay, where am I at this point? Because I can totally understand this person. I’m like, I want to coach people. I want to eventually create a course business and education business, but I have no audience. So actually the first thing I did was I tried to use my knowledge of Facebook ads to sell a pre-sell a course, and I blew $500 out of the window and I’ve never experienced something like that because I was so, so confident in my skills, you know, I could press a button and make a couple of thousand dollars a day for a plan, but I was looking at my essence, what the heck does this not, this is not working. How do I she’ll be so, okay.

Evelyn:

Me troubleshooting, understanding, okay, we need an audience. So what do people need that need an audience? I need a lead magnet. So I created a lead magnet builder template because I knew, okay, I need to create a lead magnet. And then I use the templates that I created as my lead magnet, because that was also kind of method because I knew, okay, this is something I would have fought and needed at this point. So I think it’s when niching down, it’s always great to ask, what would you have needed at this point? Or what do you need right now?

Zivi:

That’s so meta and like your most successful lead magnet was a lead magnet about how to create lead magnets. It’s it’s wonderful. So tell me a little bit about the numbers when it was

Evelyn:

It was insane. It was the coaches and course creators from United States and Canada for 34 cents. So to put that in perspective in the niche I am in, which is making money online and especially focusing, they talk about the coach coaches, I’m a coach coach. So they say that $5 leads accurate. As I told you, I’ve seen people in those groups itself, high ticket coaching, mainly they are grateful if they can get a group member for $10. So getting 35 cents per email address, and then around a dollar 40 to have a group member, especially in the United States and Canada and call that wasn’t cool. That really hit hard. The markets or the costs started to rise. It was really great. And it also did a cool thing for me. It would seasoned my ad account and anchor my, my quality as really high, which ultimately gave me really low CPMs.

So it was really working in my favor also for the conversion ads I would run after. But at that point, I didn’t even know, you know, what I was going to sell. I only knew I want to show people that I can solve the problems. And I think that’s the way to think if you genuinely care about people and you genuinely like solving problems, you’ll never run out of business. It just starts with this one problem you solve. And then there, there’s more that you can solve, but you have to kind of know, okay, this is my toolbox. Like, okay, this is like, I’m here to paint the walls. I’m not going to repair the toilet. Right. So you kind of have to also be able to say, okay, this is, this is going out of my scope or out of my range. I can give you a basic outline of how it would tackle this, but get yourself an expert. Yeah. But I think if you start with, okay, I’m just solving one problem. And then what other things do my ideal clients bring along my way. It basically becomes this never ending stream of product ideas, course ideas. And eventually once you start to work with clients one-on-one, and you understand where they are and the transformation they’re looking for, you can start to work on your signature framework.

Ziv:

So you started with a group that people can join for free and with a lead magnet that they can download for free. But you’re investing into your business on your audience. You’re creating this tribe in this group and teaching them how to do it too. And then what was the point where how many people did you have in your group when you made your first sell?

Evelyn:

Around thousand people? So my goal was also to get a thousand people within the first month, and I was very willing to just put money on the table to get to this point. Cause I also, for me that looks like a magical number. If it’s a big case study, if you can say, I went from zero to thousand people, but of course you also need to monetize it. So everything I’ve learned during this month. So for example, what kind of content do I need to share that resonates with my audience, which was surprisingly not the knowledge, content or component at all. I realized there that knowledge is doesn’t create connection. What creates connection is sharing from your genuine experience. And I don’t, I wouldn’t say being vulnerable, but being open, like being very open and don’t, don’t be concerned about what light it sheds on.

Evelyn:

You kind of just be speaking your truth. That would be the content that works really, really well, who connect me with my audience. I got the first coaching requests within the first week. So that was really interesting. There was going fast. And then after this first month, and during this time I also hit the first version of my website. I also updated my whole visuals and those kind of things. I prepared my beta launch and I eventually did a very boiled down version of a launched. I just posted in the group. I got people on the phone. I spoke with 14 people and I had 10 people saying yes to a 997 offer of basically doing the same for them, helping you find this one problem you want to solve growing your Facebook group around it, nurture people, connect with people and at the end, make a better offer. This would work extremely well for my beta clients. For example, Laura, she did 20K in sales in her first month. Julia did sevenK euros. Uh, my beta students, Thomas did 4,000 years in his first month. Uh, Sarah did 7,000 yourself all around the system and all would invest around the same amount per ads, I would say around a thousand dollars in ads. But if you think about it, it’s a four to 20 times. So it’s good. Laura even did it without ads. She just followed organic strategy. So,

Evelyn:

And we’re talking about something, like repeatedly walks for people. And if you look at the math, if the cost of each group member was $10, like it is usually, you know, for other people that would have been killing the entire thing, the entire business wouldn’t lift off. But because we were able to teach people how to get the Facebook group for an expense that is really reasonable. And if they make seven or 10 K within a month or two, that’s really nice. That’s like a, the beginning of an education business or a coaching business. And what happened next to you like that? You started to, to make money from the group. What was the next day

Evelyn:

Before I jump into that, I quickly want to say why this was so important for me. When I started this journey, I also, you know, looked into some courses and all that, and everyone would tell you, you need a high ticket to make this worth your while and to make that math add up. But I didn’t believe in that because I thought there must be smarter ways to reach more people. And this is something I’m still focusing on up until the state, because I think it’s not fair. If we put the risk on the client, we need to grow as a coach first, before we can charge a premium on our client. I think that’s really important. And I think that resonated with that 90% of the coaches that help our new coaches. And I think this resonates with them as well, because I think that most people that think about starting a coaching business, aren’t in there for the money as the main mode, if they really want to help people and make a living, educating and helping.

Evelyn:

So the money is like a nice side effect, but it comes with that. And that allowed people to do, to start the business in a way that is aligned with the values. So they didn’t have to do all these things like direct messaging or charging high ticket. They could just buy their way into it, just like I did. So after that I had a phase of that was working really well. And my first thought was, I want to turn this into a group coaching program. Once I have refined it, then I started to have a self-liquidating offer, getting paid to grow my audience. So that that’s another strategy. If you can’t get down your acquisition costs, you want to have something that contributes to the ad spend. So this is also what’s working now in your business really well or that you really optimized. So I think that was great work.

Evelyn:

And then I kind of lost the track a little bit because I couldn’t, I wanted too much. So I wanted to give them everything. And I started to, you know, when I was growing and looking to become a better coach, I also, I think it’s easy when things don’t work immediately or when you were doubtful about yourself to look into what other stool, and then it’s very easy to lose your way. So like after this works well for me and before relaunching it, I wanted to make it so much better. And then it got out of hand, it got, so the whole idea, it got so big that I wanted to solve everything. Like I wanted to start solving everything for them and, you know, making them breakfast and bringing their kids to school so they can sit down and relax for coaching almost like that.

Evelyn:

And yeah, I was doing myself with this service and also people. So then it was kind of falling off a little bit and I decided that the setting that would, and also the father of my child had to leave the country for six months. So I was alone with the baby and I felt okay, I don’t have the resources to create a full-on coaching program yet, but I still love to work with people. And I know people, they want to stick in my world and be connected with me and they want to pay me something, but I don’t have an offer for them. So I started a membership and it was basically just creating a room where people feel entitled to approach me with the problems, if that makes sense. So it was doing a founding member launch and just helping people with the things that I solve and it with adds more people streamed in what I love about it is the culture is amazing, but I got to broaden my in my content. So again, I was extending Menish and doing everyone, a this service kind of with that.

Zivi:

And what made you realize that? Because, uh, it’s very hard to say no to yourself when you want to help people.

Evelyn:

Yeah. So the term, every time someone makes sure I’m, it is relatively no. So it’s overall, it’s below 10%, which in my sphere, the benchmark industry benchmarks are 20%. So I’m cutting that in half. Although I consider my bottom, my membership still at beta, it’s still a product in development. And, but everyone that can, so either they went for the funnel and didn’t fully realize that this is a membership and what they were buying into. This was a very small amount, like handful of people, or they said, I love the group. I love the content, but I’m just overwhelmed. And that was because it wasn’t focused around you here today. Let me grab your hand. We do justice and justice and justice. So when someone would ask me, you know, I’m thinking about this, what should I do? I will be like, here are your options. And instead of saying, you do this, okay. So just, of course there’s so many things you can do, but I should just take, or it helps people more. You could just give them one option. And that’s probably the one that worked best for you as well. So

Ziv:

You transitioned from teaching them everything that you were able to do to teaching the people a more limited set of things, or maybe even like one at a time that if they do it, they will get the best results and they will not be overwhelmed, kinda.

Evelyn:

So I think it was a problem of standing my ground as an expert. So for example, when someone says would come in new and they would say, then I want to do a webinar. How should I do this? I wouldn’t dare to say to them, you shouldn’t start with a webinar. Don’t do this. You’re not ready. So I didn’t want to be harsh. I didn’t want to overwhelm people. So I would give them the best way to tweak their way into it, which is not the best guidance sometimes. And that’s something I realized you have to be the, the guidance for them. And also sometimes tell them you’re running in a wrong way. You can’t skip the step. I know you want to be faster, but you’re going to make a mistake here. So I think that that was something that just grew as my confidence grow. And now I’m a little bit more blunt with that, but it’s just to protect people from themselves.

Ziv:

Yeah. I love it. I call it the, like the pointy end of the boots. I put my, my coaching boots on and then it’s time to kick some assets and to tell people to do things the hard way, not the shortest way, usually to the shortest way.

Evelyn:

The highway is the short way, you know, it’s not even hard. It’s and I think also some things I realized is sending people back, demanding people to do their part in coaching. So, you know, coming from service provider backend, almost like an employee, I want to say. So when now, when I started to work with coaching plans and even with my members, sometimes the relationship was just, I still felt like a service provider. I didn’t play my role as the coach and say, look, I’m doing my part of coaching you, but you also do your part of putting in the work, showing up prepared, going through the things in the portal. So I would have people sending me direct messages in the night. I want to do this and I want to do that. And can you help me log into my website? And in the beginning, I will do all of that just to realize, because I can look that up in the portal is this person locked in what half of the five introduction, video, and never went for the content.

Evelyn:

And now just me to go in and fix things that she doesn’t understand, even why we’re doing them. So my role also needs to be, to set expectations better and tell people, look, this is our way here. This is the problem solution. This is how we do things. You do your part. I don’t mind that way. We go there faster. And every time I’m doing this with people, they either live fast, which is good because I’m not answering messages in the night or they get results fast, which is also good because they’re happy. Like it’s existed.

Ziv:

Love it. So what is your goal now with this? Like how are you going to continue the flow of narrowing down what you do or what you,

Evelyn:
So I just set up the whole membership growth path as project plan. I really want people to dial in the tasks, into their calendar and have a daily checklist on what they need to do. So I want to make it much more streamlined in that sense that there are no, I think every time the content allows you, this room for creativity, it’s when people are kind of in the air and they look for shiny objects, a quick fix, and this is when they drop out of the way and they tell it, go down a distraction. And so I’m refining the program to be really step by step by step. And I also realized I have a light version of my membership, which is just $49. And people always say, the amount of value is unbelievable, but it doesn’t help. If there’s so much value, if people don’t implement it, doesn’t, it’s only valuable if it, if you really implement.

Evelyn:

So the issue I found with the light version is that a lot of people take it to light. Cause it’s just $49 a month. And it’s a nice to have at this point, but you know, I can have it running the whole year. It doesn’t harm me. And then I have a premium version, which is 197 and there, I see the people turning up every week to the coaching calls, also requesting my feedback and doing their work and requesting me to do my part. And that’s just such a beautiful journey. It’s such a beautiful community. It’s inspiring for everyone. It’s motivating and it’s really helping the right type of people. So going back to what I said, when, you know, figuring out the niche, I managed a few times and I think now I’m more conscious about it and it wouldn’t happen to me again, that I’m going out of my micro-niche. So it’s more the opposite. I want to niche further down, but I also think I understood now the importance of the second part, which is the people need to be a good fit. They need to understand your vision and you want to be in there with them for the long run, getting them the best results and really changing their lives.

Ziv:

Love it. Uh, we’re, we’re kind of running out of time, but I have to ask her there’s so much, I have to ask you have this approach to help people figure out the first lead magnet. Can you talk about that?

Evelyn:

So basically I want people to brainstorm 10, to 20 problems, and this could be very, very tiny problems that people have in the beginning of their journey. So the problem could be as easy as, I don’t know how to write a specific email. So it could be just one. So, or, you know, what is a good thing? I don’t know how, I don’t know how to set up my first funnel, my opt-in funnel. I don’t know how to be very small things that just annoy people and they keep procrastinating with it because they had don’t have a template. So my idea is that people brainstorm 20 ideas and then sort them by how much pain does this cost. So how much do people procrastinate with it? And then top down, think about easy solutions that you can provide that will just save people from this creative burden that they have.

Evelyn:

And it’s just one tiny problem that you can communicate fast and it is kind of self-explanatory so you don’t need a long ad copy ideal. You just need the visual and nothing else. And those are the lead magnets that get you need for around 50 cents. Because of course the costs have risen a little bit on Facebook ads, but those are the winning lead magnets. And they go such a long way. If you can, people are happy. You know, everything that stays below $5, if you can acquire a lead for a 10th of that sum, your business can go.

Ziv:

And we’re talking about a resource that you’re creating that will be basically delivered through an email after they opt-in through, the lead through a campaign that is like a lead gen campaign in for on Facebook. Right. Nice. And it’s quite interesting how people from so many different micro niches added in your pro account or your pro membership for 1 97, we’re able to use this process and launch the first lead magnet and not a long time after that launch either a beta or a tripwire and people show up and show the results. It’s just very, very yummy. Any a word of advice that you want to share from your experience to people that are listening to this and trying to find their own micro niche like you, it seems like when you went into the micro-niche of helping people with what you do best at the beginning, it was going to a Facebook group. And then nowadays it’s about doing the things in the right order to leverage a Facebook group and A lead gen campaigns into a business that actually make money and this profitable. What is your word of advice to an entrepreneur that starts their journey?

Evelyn:

I think focusing on two types of things, the first thing is showing up authentically and sharing what you thinking about and what you’re working on. As often as you can, ideally every day on your, or on your Instagram, just you can talk for half a minute into the camera, just being when you’re sick and when you’re not feeling it, just show up anyway, just share it anyways. So just be there and document your journey, be the living case study. And it’s also okay. If it’s not always shiny and plumber and glitter and success stories that will often connect you much more with your audience and with people and, and clients. And the second thing is giving others, which you’ve created for yourself. So now we just talked about the lead magnet and the tripwire products or self-liquidating offers. You probably have already a gold mine laying on your desktop because it’s things that you’ve created for yourself in the past review, the things you’ve put time in to make things easier for yourself, processes, you create a checklist, you created emails you’ve written in the past. That worked really well. So there is a goldmine of your creativeness that lays around there and that it would be very, very valuable to others because it just saves them time.

Ziv:

Love it. Evelyn Weiss, where can people go to learn more about what you do? Ideally

Evelyn:

They go to successfulcoachads.com or they find me on Facebook and send me a friend request. So I love to connect with people in, in that sense, don’t send me a DM pitching your group program after you might expose them Instagram.

Ziv:

Uh, well, people can also find a YouTube channel and learn a lot from that. So we’ll put a link to your YouTube channel on the show notes, a daily cookie.co Evelyn Weiss. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your story with us. It’s very inspiring and it’s amazing to be around you and, and get the opportunity to ask you questions about like you just show Evelyn a funnel and she knows exactly how to optimize it. So thank you so much for being here and see you guys next week on the micro-niche mastery.

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Welcome to the seventh episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest for today is John Jonas, the founder, and CEO of OnlineJobs.ph and onevaaway.com, which solve the common problem of entrepreneurs which is – how do you grow your team.

John’s love for staying at home made him the CEO of an online business. Wanna know how? Listen to his story

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Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

 Welcome to the micro-niche mastery podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro-niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he teaches his ten-year-old girl. How to invest in the stock market. Ziv Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello, welcome to the Micro Niche mastery. I’m so excited to have in here, a gentleman, a CEO of a company that actually helps us in daily cookie more than once. And just someone that is very generous with this knowledge about entrepreneurship and about growing your company. John Jonas from online jobs.ph. Hello, John.

John:
 Hey, thanks for having me.

Ziv:
It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’ve started a little bit about you and like you’re justifying being on your email list. It’s enough to do that. You can learn a lot. You started in, uh, computer science, right? And then what was the journey from then to becoming a CEO of an online business that helps other entrepreneurs?

John:
Yeah, you’re right. I did. So, I graduated from college of computer science and when I was in college, I was actually studying computer science and I was pre-law like, I was going to go to law school and I took a pre-law class and realized, oh my gosh, I do not want to do this. I don’t want to be a lawyer. And so after when I graduated, I got a job and I had that job for eight months. And my only goal during that time was to quit because like the employee structure, just the incentive structure didn’t work for me. I didn’t like that. If I did good work, I got paid. And if I did bad work, I got paid and it didn’t know how much it got paid. Didn’t change. And then I didn’t like leaving for work every day when I had a one-year-old at home and my wife would call me and she’d be like, oh my gosh, you just missed what he did. It was so cute. Like I hated that I wanted to be at home. So it took me eight months to have enough income, to have enough savings and potential income to say like, Hey, now’s the time like now it never gets easier to leave a job because the older you get, the more you make, the more commitments you make, you get a bigger house, you get a bigger mortgage or whatever, you know?

And she told me, I just wrote this out yesterday. Actually, my wife told me when I quit my job, she said, okay, that’s fine. But you have six months. If this doesn’t work in six months, you have to go back and get a job because she had grown up with like, just watching other entrepreneurs who drug their families through failure after failure. And you know, it was just a mess. And for me, my, it didn’t work like that. Like I was doing some consulting and that, that was stable and good. And I was it me a couple of months to make some money online. And that was a little bit and it, it wasn’t sustainable. And I knew that. And so I started learning other things. And eventually I hired someone in the Philippines. I got a really good tip to hiring someone because I had tried a bunch of other stuff I had tried hiring and other places.

And I had hired, tried Upwork, which actually was Ilana at the time contract work. And that was super frustrating. I tried hiring people locally and it didn’t work. And I hired this person in the Philippines and it completely changed the way I thought about business. And then people wanted to know, like people kept asking, like, how are you hiring these people? How’s this working out, what’s going on? And so I started teaching it and that was where, like I was where some of the transition towards being the CEO started happening. I taught it for a couple of years before I started online jobs.pH, because finding people in the Philippines just sucked. It was, there was nothing at the time. And so then I started on my jobs. I paid for that mostly for myself, because I was like, dude, I want to hire another person.

And these stupid agencies that I’m using are so dumb and they won’t give me the person I want. And then they mark up the salary three times and it was like, you know, I think there’s a better way.

Ziv:

Wow. Uh, tell me a little bit about the first few steps of this, like the baby or online jobs pH how it grew into what it is today.

John:

Yeah. So, like I said, I wanted to hire someone, myself. I had gone to an agency and they said, well, do you want a programmer or a webmaster? I was like, well, I want a content writer. They were like, well, do you want a program or a webmaster? That was so frustrating to me. I just wanted to recruit someone on my own. And so I thought like, maybe I could build the software, this platform and get a few hundred Filipino resumes into it.

And then I could recruit someone on my own. And so I hired someone in the field. I told him I want a programmer. I went back to the agency and hired a programmer in the Philippines to build this job board. And we built it and it took us like, I think, eight months or so, and put it out there. And I had a couple of people in the Philippines working for me at the time. And I asked them like, Hey, what could you guys do to like market this in the Philippines? And they each gave me one thing that they could do, or two things that they could do. We had a couple of hundred resumes in the first month. And every month after that, it just kept growing. Last year, we passed over a million resumes and we’re not quite approaching 2 million yet, but it’s the speed with which it’s growing is it’s fast.

So, I mean, that’s like employers around the world are using it. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of employers use it, which I never thought I built this thing for myself. And then people started using it.

Ziv:

Well, it’s really the thing. And again, I’m a customer, so I’m happy. But for those of you, for the listeners, right. Necessarily understand what’s the big deal of job boards, like job boards, also eighties. And what is the big deal of hiring in the Philippines? Maybe you’ve been help us pay the picture. Yeah. So I was talking with the owner of back country.com. They’re the largest online retailer of outdoor gear. And he said, you know, when you’re ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it. And I was like, huh. And he gave me some really compelling reasons why the Philippines and it wasn’t that it was like, oh wow, this is amazing.

It just kind of gave me hope that maybe I would find something different, something different than, than what I had experienced in outsourcing. And it took me a couple of months. I didn’t hire because I, you know, I didn’t know if I could hire someone full-time he gave me a reference where I could hire someone full-time and agency. And I didn’t know if I could keep someone busy full-time I didn’t know if I could afford someone. I didn’t know if they could do as good of work as me. I just didn’t know. And in the end I hired this guy and it was the most liberating experience of my life. I had this guy who his full-time job was to do anything. I asked him to do anything I could train him to do. And this is 2005. And that was just shocking to me.

I was paying the agency $750 a month. They were paying him 250 a month, which I didn’t know that. But so then the concept for people listening is it’s different in the Philippines. And so at online jobs that pH, which is dot Philippines, we have focused specifically and only on the Philippines. And it’s been so good for employers that it has grown so much that we have people from around the world joining to try and find jobs. And we kick them off because the culture of the Philippines is just different. Like, it’s just a different experience hiring someone in the Philippines and it’s not, you know, it’s not like this is, you should only ever hire someone from the Philippines. Right. But just generally, they’re super honest with foreigners to the point where my guys in the Philippines have my credit card, they have access to my PayPal account.

They have my personal email account. Like I’ve seen very, very few cases of things getting stolen over the years from the Philippines. They’re super loyal almost to a fault. Like you hire someone and give them a full-time job and you treat them well, they’ll never quit working for you.

The first guy I ever hired in 2005 still works for me today. And that’s not to say that you won’t have any turnover. Um, I’ve had some, it’s just so, so much less than elsewhere because they are so loyal. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don’t want to steal your business or your idea or your domain. They speak really good English. It’s a primary language in the Philippines. You won’t have communication issues with them. They speak their English is really good. They are a pleasing culture. Like they just want to make you happy by nature and all of this hinges on them trusting you.

So a lot of us go into this thinking like, oh, I don’t know if I can trust this person. They have that same feeling, but it’s stronger than your feeling. So as long as you gain their trust, all of these things that I’ve said, you’ll find out pretty quickly that there, this is kind of their culture. And so it’s, you’re right. It’s just a job board. But because we focus on the Philippines specifically and I’ve made it like by far the best way to find a good worker, people keep using it.

Ziv:

Well, actually, to be fair, it’s not just a job because it’s is job board that helps entrepreneurs realize what is most important for them? Like what are the skills that they are looking for and how much that will cost. And it’s so fast and simple. And like, to the point of like really kissed, just keeping it very, very simple.

It takes five minutes to start a new job and to ask for resumes and you get people respond immediately and get them to come to an interview. And you just had the entire booking process end to end, can be done in man hours, like 48 hours. You can hire someone and sure. You might take time to interview and whatnot, but it’s very, very simple. And I think that the fact that there’s nothing fancy in the, the technology maybe, right? It’s just a website that gives you information, but in terms of results in your business, that’s what matters to me, the practical stuff. Does it help you make your business grow? Does it help you actually get stuff done? Way faster than some of the alternatives I have to admit. So I want to ask you about specificity. You know, we are in the micro-niche mastery.

We talk about how to go micro and how to be specific with your business. But what about with your virtual assistant or your helper in the Philippines? How important is it that you will hire someone that is specific versus like the general-purpose helper?

John:

So that’s a good question. The first person I hired, I didn’t have a choice. I said, I want a webmaster, cause I didn’t want a programmer. And I didn’t want a web master either. I wanted someone that could do some marketing for me. And, and so I hired this guy and he wasn’t a webmaster. He didn’t know anything. And so I started teaching him stuff. So here’s what I always recommend to people for their first hire. So first of all, you know, you’re ready to hire someone when you have something that you know how to do in your business, that is important that you feel like you could teach someone else.

So if you don’t have something that you could teach someone else to do, then you’re not ready to hire up. You’re not ready to hire someone. If you don’t have any processes that you do, or you know how to do that someone else could do, then you’re not ready to hire someone. Right. But if you do, and that could be so simple as like, oh, I know how to do lead generation on LinkedIn, but I’m not doing it because I’m too busy. Yeah. You can hire someone, hire someone to do lead generation on LinkedIn and teach them how to do it. Right. Or I know how to do social media marketing, but I’m not doing it. Or I know how to do, you know, whatever it is. Right. So then my next thing, so this is, this has to do with the, how important is it to hire someone specific versus general so that whatever that thing is that you’re currently doing, my recommendation is you hire someone to do that thing for you.

Something that you know, how to do. There’s so much advice online. That’s like, oh, do what you’re good at and hire and outsource the rest. I’m like, dude, that’s terrible, terrible advice. I’m good at being a programmer. Should I be a programmer and an outsource the CEO role of my, like, that doesn’t work. You know? So what I reckon and just hire someone to do something, you know, how to do. And so now you no, what the skills are that you need. And now you, you know, immediately like, oh, I need someone that, that edits videos, you know, that’s a very specific thing. Or, you know, like, oh, I have these six things that are editing images for social media and generating leads and doing some customer support and do some data entry. Like these are all general things. I can hire a job general virtual assistant, and they’re going to be able to fill all these roles for me.

And obviously not all at once, you know, this, isn’t like a magic bullet. You have to, you’re going to have to teach them to do each of those things individually. And I would recommend start with one, but if you’re willing to say like, okay, here’s the thing that I know how to do. And here’s what I’m going to teach someone to do. Then people usually know, oh, I should hire someone specific, a very specific type of person, or I should hire a, a general VA.

Ziv:

 So it’s about what you want to delegate basically. And if you have enough of it to start, but is there really like a VA that can do everything for you?

John:
Everything, no, this is a common misconception. Like I get emails from people that are like, Hey, I need someone that can build my website and make it look really great and write articles and create a sales page and write sales copy and do the design work and edit these videos and make this custom set.

Like, no, sorry that doesn’t exist. But it’s reasonable to hire someone that is going to do that understands SEO and they can do lead generation and they can edit photos for you, something like that. Or it’s reasonable to find someone that is a good video editor and audio editor, and can do some design work. So you can find things that will overlap. And it’s actually interesting. I had a conversation about this yesterday. It’s reasonable to hire someone for a specific role. And then later on, you’ll find out like, oh, this person is also really good at this other thing. And I had no idea and yeah, let’s have you do that for me too. Um, 40 hours a week is a lot of time and I recommend people hiring a full-time person rather than a, an hourly person. That’s a, there’s a big, big difference.

And so you’re not going to find someone that can do everything, but you can certainly find someone that can do multiple things.

Ziv:
Why is it that a full-time is better? You think?

John:

So there’s two sides to this. I’ll talk about both sides from the worker in the Philippines part-time or contract work or hourly work is always associated with temporary work and temporary work means. And it’s so common in the Philippines. Temporary work means that in a couple of months or whenever it is, they have to go find another job and finding another job sucks. Like that’s so much stress in your life. So if you hire temporary or if you hire per contract or hourly, that person is very, very likely looking for another job elsewhere. And that means they’re going to find another job and they’re going to work for someone else. And they’re not going to leave you because that’s not how the Philippines works.

They’re super loyal, but their primary focus will be whatever full-time job they have. So you can hire part-time. I still recommend you pay a salary versus paying hourly. If you can hire full-time great then, I mean, that’s the best case scenario pay a salary, hire them. Full-time Hey, I’m going to pay you $500 a month for 40 hours a week. That’s the best case scenario. So here’s the other side of it, especially for entrepreneurs. So when I started, like, it seems, so it seems so good to hire someone hourly. Like it’s, non-committal like, if they’re not busy, then if I don’t keep them busy, then that’s not my problem. Right. Well, what that says to yourself and you don’t realize this is, I’m not committed to making my business grow here. Like I’m just too busy working in my business to work on my business, to keep this person busy.

Right? And so you pay, you hire someone hourly and when they’re not busy, well, you don’t care. You can still answer your dumb emails, but I’m making a full tiring of someone. Full time is a commitment to yourself that like, yeah, I’m going to grow my business. I’m going to work on my business instead of just in my business. And so those are the two sides from the worker and from the entrepreneur. And that was really the transition that made me transition from being the worker in my business, to being the CEO. When I started hiring full-time people and they finished the work that I gave them, and I thought it would take them three days and it took him four hours. I was like, oh, I have to give you something to do, or I’m wasting time and money. So I guess I better step away from the silliness that I’m working on, which I didn’t think it was silliness, but dang, my business started to grow.

It was amazing.

Ziv:

Why do you think, do you think that getting your company to grow on businesses in general is not easy? There’s no person that you can say that you can hire them and they will make sure that your business goes, why is that?

John:

Yeah. It’s not a thing. Here’s the other side of it. Have you ever seen a really good successful business? That’s just one person. There’s no such thing. We call them solopreneurs or an entrepreneur, whatever, you know, like it’s fine to be an entrepreneur. It’s fine to start off as a solopreneur, but you can not do it on your own. Nobody has ever been alone and created a really good, big business. It’s not, it doesn’t exist. The other side of it is like, as the business owner, it’s your job to drive. You can’t be the passenger because someone else doesn’t care like you do their livelihood. Doesn’t depend on you, succeeding. They can get another job. And so what I, what I often find is the only thing that I do in my business is think I solve hard problems and I solve problems. I don’t want to solve. And I do things in my business that I don’t want to do because it’s hard. But that’s what I find that successful entrepreneurs do is they do the hard things. And part of that heart is stepping away and saying, yeah, I need help. I need to find someone here.

Ziv:

What are some of your clients that are like in a very, very specific type of business that you were like shocked or surprised that they came over and asked for help?

John:

 So I have a really hard time with that because we have customers in every, every niche imaginable. I mean, like we have general realtors who are, you know, like they’re just trying to sell houses. We have specific real estate investors who are only doing a specific type of real estate investing. We have coaches or lifestyle coaches or entrepreneurs or insurance agents, or doctors or attorneys or Uber and Google, all of them are customers. So we have e-commerce owners that, I mean, I talked to someone yesterday, what does she sell? She has an e-commerce store selling, gosh, crazy. Oh my God, I don’t even know what it is. It was so crazy. But every type of industry, every type of person that, that you can imagine, people that make a full-time living podcasting or YouTube, or I know someone locally here who she has a swimsuit line that she created herself and she’s using people in the Philippines to help her build her brand.

I mean, this has been so common now that I can think of multiple neighbors of mine who have people in the Philippines, my neighbor across the street is he’s dabbling right? In a super micro niche. And he’s finding products on eBay and posting them on Facebook marketplace and listing them on his own website. That’s like super simple, but he’s posting them on Facebook marketplace as like, oh, this is, I’m selling this thing. And he has his VA find stuff on Facebook or a Facebook stuff on eBay posted on Facebook. When people respond, she responds to them and then she helps them place the order. And then she goes to eBay and places, the order and ships straight to them, right? It’s like, you can find someone to do anything.

Ziv:

I wish there was a person like that could grow your business. It doesn’t exist. You need to go your business, you need to own it.

And I think that it would be great if there was a button that like makes everything simple and easy there isn’t, but hiring a VA is the closest thing. So tell us about one VA away. What is that all about?

John:

Yeah. So a few years ago I realized like, people’s biggest question is how do I know if I’m going to find someone good because you’re busy and I know you’re busy, you don’t have the time to go find someone and you don’t want to weed through people. You don’t really know what you’re doing. And, and so I realized, I never asked that question of myself anymore. When I go to find someone I’m really confident that I’m going to find someone great, because I’ve done it enough. And I’ve developed a process that I trust. And if I follow the process, it’s going to turn out really good.

And, and so I realized, you know, like I can share this process. It’s, it’s not super complicated. It’s not hard. You just have to follow it. And so I recorded myself. I recorded the process, was like specific examples and me talking through it. And I tried to make it as quick as I could. There are seven steps and it’s like, here’s how you determine who to hire. And here’s how you post your job. And here’s how you determine how much to pay. And here’s the first step in the interview process. And here’s what not to do. Everybody wants to do a Skype interview. First, don’t do a Skype interview first. It’s fine to do that later in the process, but it’s a mistake early. Here are questions you should be asking here. Here’s how I ask these questions. Here’s how you determine the final thing.

Here’s negotiating. Here’s the things you should be negotiating. Here’s things to be aware of like holidays and paid time off and stuff like that. You know, like here’s, here’s how I deal with all of these different things. And I put it into the system and just made it super easy. And so it’s a step-by-step process that like, if you follow it, each step will give you something to do. And like you said, you can hire someone in 48 hours and it won’t take you 48 hours. It’ll take you a couple hours of time and you have someone working for you. Full-time. So if anyone wants to learn more about this challenge, or what should they do, it’s at onevaaway.com. It’s $49. And it has a hundred percent money back guarantee. If you don’t find someone great, I’ll just give you your money back. No questions asked if I don’t earn your money. I don’t want to keep it.

 Ziv:

Sweet. You can go to onlinejobs.ph and onevaaway.com to learn more about that. John, you chose to solve a specific problem in this world, which is how to efficiently affordably and fast hire a VA in the Philippines. And you just chose to do that and do it really well. And for that, I want to say, thank you for going into this micro niche of solving one problem and doing it well, and eventually finding out that there’s a lot of people that really needed that thing, that service. So thank you for taking the time for being here in the show. And that’s a fantastic, yeah.

John:

So in terms of like, I mean, what you’re talking about micro niche almost every day, I get an email from someone that says, Hey, you should do this in this other country, Hey, you should do this and replicate this. You have the software. And every time I say no, because along with along the lines of what you’re teaching, like there’s only so much bandwidth. And the more you focus, the better you get at it. And it’s not just that people tell me like, Hey, do you have an office in the Philippines? And you can like, you can be the agency. No, no, I’m not going to do that because diverts away from my super focused business model, that is so good for workers. And for employers, you know, we don’t mark up salaries. We don’t have an office. I don’t have an office in the Philippines. I have 37 people full-time there and they all work from home and it’s so good for them. You know, we walk the talk and I told Cole, I love what you’re teaching. Like the micro niches, it’s the way to go. And people think, oh man, there’s such a bigger market out there. Like, no, dude, you don’t need that huge market. You just need something small.

Ziv:

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I thank you so much for your kind words and thank you everyone for listening for yet. Another episode niche mastery podcast. Bye bye guys.

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.co, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting at daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

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Welcome to the sixth episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest today is Adrian Savage, an expert in email deliverability and automation, the founder and CEO of Deliverability Dashboard.  

Do you want to be heard more by your audience, avoid that horrible spam folder and avoid the promotions tab? Double your open email rate by listening to this episode!

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Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro-niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he has three kids and goes on a fun day with them at least once a week, Ziv Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello, welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery podcast. I am excited to have Adrian Savage today. And for two main reasons, Adrian, he is an expert on the topic of deliverability. And this is something that we all care about in email marketing land, that the million-dollar question, which is how to avoid the spam folder and w open rates and all of the good stuff that you Adrian teach. But also I’m excited to talk with you because just exactly like we preach in this podcast, you chose a micro niche. You chose to just like solve one problem and do it very, very, very environment specific way. And as a result, you have the grown business. So hello, Adrian Savage. Tell me, first of all, a little bit about your journey.

Adrian:

Hi, and thank you so much for inviting me. So it’s been an interesting journey because I’ve been a computer geek since I was seven years old. My dad brought home an apple two computer, and I ended up reading the manual and teaching him how to use it. So I’ve been a geek ever since then. Really, I went to school, learned all about it, did the traditional corporate job for many, many years. It telecoms that kind of thing. But then I escaped about 10 years ago, learned all about entrepreneurship and marketing, coupled that with my technology background and suddenly getting into the whole world of marketing and marketing automation online marketing became a no brainer. So for many years I was a fairly, you know, it was very generic. Infusionsoft consultant worked with other marketing platforms, but I found that a lot of clients all had the same problem that they were finding that some of their emails were going to the spam folder.

And in some cases they weren’t actually getting through at all. And I did lose a few clients the hard way to start with, because at that point I still hadn’t learned enough around what was important, but I seem to start finding little ways, little tricks of getting emails through when other people couldn’t and about seven, six or seven years ago. Now I wrote some software to actually reroute emails from marketing platforms via third party thing or things like Amazon SES and other systems like that. Because at that point, if the email didn’t come from a marketing platform, it was more likely to reach the inbox. Unfortunately, the world has changed since then. It’s not just about where you send your emails from anymore, but that the start of my exposure to the whole world had a deliverability. And I ignored so many obvious messages from the universe over the years that this was the thing that I should focus on.

I kept trying to do the whole general thing, but luckily a bit over two years ago, there was a really big storm in the Infusionsoft world because suddenly lots of emails were going to spam because you are who changed the rules. Microsoft changed the rules, Google tightened their rules up. And I was perfectly placed because by then I’d written more software that was, that was looking at how you manage various things that impact deliverability. And I was able to explain to people, this is why your emails aren’t getting through. This is what you need to do. And suddenly I realized that people need to know this stuff. And ever since then, that’s what I focused on. So it’s reached the point now where all I do is email deliverability. And exactly like you said, this is pretty much, it’s a niche within a niche, or maybe even a niche within a niche within a niche, because there are very few people that have the same breadth and depth of knowledge that I’ve developed over the years.

So there’s not much competition. There’s a very high demand for that level of specialism, with the right kind of audience. So it’s just worked really well. And also I’m particularly lucky because this is something that as well as something that I’ve actually learned to be good at, I also really enjoy. I love helping people and helping other people be heard more because let’s face it. If we’re using email, we’ve got an audience. We want to share our message with the audience. We want to be heard more. So, you know, deliverability is probably one of the most important things there because it doesn’t matter. I mean, there’s, if you run an amazing company that provides email copies of people and I’ve got firsthand experience of how good that copy is now, it’s really good, but it doesn’t matter how good the copy is. If people aren’t seeing those emails, then it doesn’t matter if you’re paying a million dollars to the best copywriter in the world.

If your emails aren’t being seen. So deliverability is really, really important. So many people don’t realize that they’re just unknowingly hurting their reputation and they’re unknowingly continuing to do things that are making it less likely that people will see the emails. So what I’m really passionate about now is sharing that message so that as many people as possible can understand how you can be heard more by your audience, how you can avoid that horrible spam folder, how you can avoid the promotions tab. And if you do everything that we talk about, and some of the things we’ll share today, you can absolutely double your open rates. And that will make a huge difference.

Ziv:

I mean, this is all great stuff and really important, indeed, because email marketing is such a powerful way to grow your business. To people, make decisions about the money decisions. Now, when they receive emails, they check it. The first thing that they, when they wake up and if you are a marketer, a business owner and people are ignoring your emails, that is really frustrating and actually costs you money. So it’s worthwhile to find ways to work on that, but it is when you’re going to give us some tips, some of them are just like do’s and don’t do this. And south demo in the level of like, here’s how you manage the situation, right? It here’s how you, you make sure that you minimize the future risk as well. But let’s start with some quick wins. Let’s give our listeners a quick win and some tips from your brilliant mind in experience in this

Adrian:

Okay. So the first thing to bear in mind is there are four key areas that impacts on whether you’re going to hit the inbox or the spam folder. And that’s what I’ve used to create. What I call the race method and race spells out four things. It’s offer reputation, a for authentication C for content E for engagement, and as a very quickly touch on each of those. And then I’ll pick out a couple of quick wins because first off reputation, reputation is everything. And there, there are three email giants out there. Now Google dominate the world. They run more than half of the email boxes that you are likely to be sending to. If you’ve got a fairly typical audience, Microsoft and other 10 to 15% Yahoo, another 10%, so they can make up maybe three quarters or more of your audience, you have to play by their rules and all of these big mailbox providers, they keep a little dossier of what they think of your reputation based on how many emails you get opened based on how many spam complaints you receive based on whether you’re doing crazy things.

So if you’re buying an email list and sending out to people that haven’t given you permission, and you get lots of spam complaints, then guess what your reputation is going to take a hit. If you’re sending emails out to people that don’t want to hear from you, and you get a 5% open rate, guess what your reputation is going to take a hit. So everything you do can make an impact on your reputation. So we’re going to talk about these other things in a moment, but reputation is everything. If you get a bad reputation with Google, I have seen clients where you can actually check your reputation with Google. This something called postmaster tools and their reputation went from high to medium, to low, to bad and bad is the rock bottom. If you have a bad reputation with Google, you will probably get about a 0.2, 5% open rate.

Nobody will see your emails. They will all be going to spam. So really important to make sure that you protect your reputation, make particularly make sure that you’re not sending out emails to spam traps, which means that you have to make sure that you’re keeping your list clean. You’re only sending to people that opening because all of these things, they can either hurt your reputation with the mailbox providers or worse. You can end up on a public block lists something like spam house or SORBS or one of these other ones, because they’re looking out for people who are behaving badly. If they see bad behavior, any kind of spammy sending or sending without permission, that kind of thing. You’re going to end up on a block list. So you’ve gotta be really, really careful manage your reputation. And

Ziv:

By the way, you mentioned a tool by Google, which is postmaster.google.com, where people can actually test for the reputation, which is really, really cool.

Adrian:

Yeah. Very much so worth keeping an eye on that, for sure. And then let’s talk about authentication because this is a one-off thing that if you haven’t set up your authentication already, this is the first quick that you absolutely must do. It’s a one off thing, because what we have to do is you tell the world who we trust to send our emails, and we make sure that we’re signing our emails. So we’ll talk about the two most important methods. The first one is called DK I M so it stands for domain keys, identified mail, and this is something you have to set up on every single platform you use to send email. So if you’re using G suite or Microsoft 365, you need to the setup in there. If you’re using MailChimp or HubSpot or infusion soft or active campaign, whatever you’re using, you have to set it up in that platform as well.

And maybe if you have a helpless system may be in there as well. And you’ll look for a setting that will say something like email authentication, or maybe it’ll will. Yeah. D K I M when you go in and you set that up and it’s a one-off thing to do, and once you’ve set it up, every time a single email you send from that platform will then contain a digital. The only you can use. And it proves the world that the emails coming from your domain are legitimate. They came from you because a spammer can actually pretend to send emails from your domain as well. But because they don’t have access to your DNS server, they can’t set up the signatures. Only. You can do that. So setting up DKIM and signing every mail you send, then you’re demonstrating to the Googles and the Microsoft and the yahoos of this world that you’re a legitimate sender.

And the emails that you’re sending really did come from you. And that is the one most important thing that you need to do before you then go and set up the second authentication, which is called SPF, which stands for sender policy framework. Now this one, you have to be a little bit more careful because if you get this one wrong, you can end up unwittingly sending more of your emails to spam, because SPF is just a record that you publish in your domain using your DNS server. But it’s telling the world which servers you trust to send your emails. So you might list G suite in there. You might list infusion soft. You might list Zen desk or something like that, whatever platforms you’re doing, you only have one SPF record. If you have that’s as bad as having none at all, you have a mistake in that record, some kind of syntax record error.

Then you’re going to find that your emails don’t necessarily get through. So you need to make sure you know what you’re doing, or get an expert to do it for you, because SPF is really, really important. There’s ways that you can check it online. And there’s tool called MX toolbox that will tell you whether or not your SPF record has got any errors in it. But what they won’t tell you is they won’t tell you if you’ve forgotten to list one of your email platforms only, you know, I used to be in there. So you need to be very careful with that. But if you set up Dee came and set up SPF, then that is going to massively boost your chances of getting into the inbox. And it’s a one-off thing that you do. The only time you come back to authentication is if you change your email platform at some point.

So that’s the really, really important thing. The third part authentication is called D mark, less important. It’s still worth doing if you’ve got the time and resources to do it, but the main purpose of DMARC is to prevent yourself getting spoofed by other people, because it tells the world what to do when authentication fails. But DMARC, you do have to be careful because if you get that wrong, then you will absolutely end up in spam pretty much a hundred percent of the time. So Deakin has most important followed by SPF. DMARC is the third one, but that’s all we need to worry about on the authentication front. Let me just

Ziv:

Share this in one of my businesses, I ran six Michael niches businesses in one of them back when I started with daily emails, I didn’t know, I didn’t know about SPF. And they came, I didn’t know about how MailChimp calls it, uh, authenticate and validate, uh, your domain. And as a result, I started sending daily emails without these two fields. And I started to notice how the open rates are going down and down. And the, up to the point where it became like something around Zero opened, literally no one was, was getting the email. And I started to look online and found out these parameters and fix them. But it’s took a good two months until it started to get back to being manageable. And it was obviously very fascinating because in those two months, I’ve lost a major channel of communication. Since then, I like to explain about, uh, became in SPF kind of like you wouldn’t travel between airports in different countries without wearing your passport with you, having your passport with you and with the right signature on it that it’s like up-to-date, and that’s the same way with emails.

You can send them all over the world through all of these, uh, Gmail, Yahoo servers without giving them those proper documentation of, of came in SPF. And if you, if this is scary for you, we’ll listening right now. There are people out there to help you starting with potentially the hosting company that you work with, or the support teams of Microsoft or Google. If you’re using something like that, or experts like Adrian that know how to like, just thank you directly to the ant results of a valid operational authentication situation. What’s the next thing I’m excited. What’s

Adrian:

So the next one is content. So we’ve done reputation, we’ve done authentication. So the C and race is content. This is something that I could spend about three days talking about, and I’ve got about three minutes. So I’m going to focus on the foremost important things very briefly, because there’s another acronym that will help you remember. And this is an old English name of a gentleman called will and will stands for words, images, links, and frequency. So the words, it kind of makes sense if it looks like spam, and if it sounds like spam, then Google are going to treat it as spam people try and gain the system. They try and hide words like free. And in maybe in the old days, you could do that. But the best advice I can give now is be authentic. Make it sound a personal email. You’re sending to someone don’t try and make it sound what it isn’t.

Don’t have a Wolf in sheep’s clothing, make it be genuine, authentic, lead with content, get an offer in there as appropriate, but the words really matter, but also the images and the links make a huge difference, because if you’ve got more than two or three images, and more than two or three links, you are much more likely to end up in the promotions tab in Google. So minimize those images. If you’ve got a great big graphic at the top of your email, stop and take it away right now. And here’s why when you’re sending an email, you want it to look like it’s come from you personally, if you’re sending an email from your phone or from your outlook or G suite or whatever, do you have a great big image at the top? Or do you just start with dares? If I know what I do, and you want to make sure your emails are looking like they’re personal.

So put the image somewhere in the middle to reinforce the message and the love of all things sacred. If you’ve got all those social media icons at the bottom of your email signature with links, please take them out right now because firstly, the purpose of your email is to get someone to follow a call to action, not to distract them, send them off to Facebook or YouTube where you’ll lose them forever. And secondly, by having all those extra links, then you’re going more likely to be in the promotions tab. And also why often those social media platforms end up on block lists as well. And if any domain or link that you’ve gotten an email is on a block list, even for short term, that means the email will go into spam as well. So make sure you minimize the images, minimize the number of links because even the unsubscribed link counts as one link and just try and minimize that as much as possible.

And that’s going to make a big difference. And then the final quick one is frequency of emails. The more content you can share the better know this is why I love sending out daily emails because people get into the habit of reading your emails. You can add lots of value. You can occasionally make offers, but people realize that you’re there to communicate with them, to educate them, to entertain them, to give them learnings. And then when the time is right, make the offer. And because they’re in the habit of receiving your emails, they will be open to those offers. So content really, really matters. And there’s some big mistakes you can make. You might not personalize your email. You might have bad subject lines, you know, in general, the shorter and more succinct. And the more curiosity driven, the better sometimes that preview text that you put in that can make a big difference as well.

But people still make this mistake of writing a whole sales page and an email. They write about 27 pages in an email. The shorter, the better the purpose of the email is to get people to read, engage, and then maybe click a link, find out more if they’re interested and don’t put too many exclamation marks and other crazy punctuation in there. Because again, that’s not what you would normally do. It’s going to sound as normal as possible. Content can make a huge difference, but those are just a few of the little things that that will help hopefully anything to throw in on that ones. If I’m sure you’ve got thoughts about frequency in particular,

Adrian:

That’s exactly what I was about to ask. So like what I see sometimes people that are very afraid of sending the daily email and there’s nothing wrong with sending a newsletter once a week or two to three emails a week is great business results to be had from doing that. But, uh, what’s your point? What’s your profit. I know you, you believe in sending more emails, but what is your professional input about that?

Adriann:

I’ve done a lot of tests around frequency and let’s start with the assumption that you’re going to be sending the emails to the people that want to receive them. I’ll talk about more about engagement in a second, but assuming you’re not doing that when I was sending emails less frequently to my engaged audience, I was getting a 40 to 50% open rate. When I switched to sending emails every single day. Yes it did drop because no one’s going to open every single email, although that’s actually not true because about 10% of my audience amazed me by opening every single email I’ve ever sent. But what I found was that over the month of February, when I sent 28 emails, one every single day, then my open rate dropped from 40 somethings a percent to maybe 35%. But the interesting thing was by the end of that month, more than 75% of my audience had opened one or more email from me.

So just by sending an email every single day, I reached three quarters. My audience, if I was sending any one email a week, it would have taken me maybe three or four months to reach that number of people. So it is interesting because it’s not the same 30 odd percent of the open every time, the more frequently you send the better and let’s face it. If they don’t like you, they’re going to unsubscribe because they will get tired of those emails. And that’s a good thing because we don’t want to send emails to people that don’t like us frequency is great because they will either love you or they will not particularly like you. And I would rather, they vote with their feet and go away. So I don’t waste time and money sending emails to people that don’t want to don’t want my help.

Ziv:

Yeah. This raises a, another topic that I want to touch briefly. There’s the topic of how, what do you feel when people are subscribed from your list?

Adrian:

I see it as very, very positive because you know, we’re going to talk about engagement in a minute. We don’t want to send emails to people that aren’t interested. And if we can get someone to unsubscribe that saves us the trouble of having to remove them from our list ourselves, when we realize they’re not interested, it’s very similar to sales. The first rule of sales is that a yes is great, but a no is also great because it means that we can stop wasting their time, stop wasting our time. So if someone unsubscribes, that’s a good thing, they weren’t going to buy your stuff anyway. And I would much rather lose people from the list because they actively don’t want to receive the information rather than through apathy, because that’s one of the thing that Google hates more than anything else is people ignoring you.

They will start to penalize you massively as we’ll talk about in a second. But that’s my thoughts. The more, the more unsubscribes, the better as long as, and this is the, the caveat, your list is always going to shrink because either people will decide they don’t like you, or they will, they will maybe just lose interest or, or whatever. And you’ve got to expect your audience to decrease by 10% a month, as much as that. So it means it’s really important that you are always out there adding to your list and creating new leads as much as possible. And one of the big mistakes I see people make is they’re not doing that. The more people you can get onto your list, who are matching the type of person you’re looking for, the more healthy your email audience is going to become, because otherwise you’ll find that you lose more people than you gain. So lead generation is absolutely vital.

Ziv:

Sweet,Love it. Let’s talk about engagement.

Adrian:

Okay? So this is the second quick win, but it’s a bit of a chat. If you want to take advantage of this, because in many cases that you have got to change the entire way you think about your email audience, because the old fashioned way of marketing was you built the biggest email list you could, and then you mail the hell out of it until they either buy or they die or they unsubscribe. And this is the biggest rule that Google in particular have changed. Now, Google now penalize you. If you continue to send emails to people that are ignoring you, because the more that they ignore you, then the worse your reputation is going to get. And if your reputation goes down, then guess what is less likely that your emails are going to go into the inbox? So what that means is we have to become very aware of the people that are opening up emails.

Adrian:

They’re the ones that we want to focus on. And if they’re not opening your emails, then sooner, rather than later, you were to watch the Disney frozen movie, listen to the song and let it go. Because you do not want people on you who aren’t interested for every, you know, a lot of people. Well, the biggest objection that I have when I suggest to people that they’ve got to let people go from their list, this is the I’ve spent a lot of money building this list. And maybe in another six months they might buy something. And I’ve got to be honest and say that, yes, if we just look for the people that haven’t opened, anything for three months or longer, if you send an email to those people, then you will typically get a 1% or 2% open rate from the people because sometimes they do wait, but it is so rare that the prices she pay for getting that low open rate to that part of your audience is it, your reputation is getting hurt.

And the engaged people on your list will no longer be receiving those emails in their inbox because your reputation has been hurt. So you might get another one or 2% of email opens to these people that haven’t opened. But the cost you’ll pay is that you’re engaged people, maybe 10% or more of those we’ll stop seeing your emails. And you really want to lose 10% of your good really warm people, just because you might get 1% of the cold people. So that’s what you’ve got to bear in mind here. You got to look ideally for the people that have opened something in the last 30 days, those, the one that you should send an email as frequently as possible to ideally single day. And then when they reach 30 days and they haven’t opened anything for the last month, I still mail those for a while, but it’s pointless sending something every year day because they haven’t been opening anything.

And remember Einstein’s definition of is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Then if they’re not opening emails, mail them less frequently, maybe once a week between 30 and 90 days of an engagement, because they might still wake back up. But when they get to 90 days, it’s time to stop completely. Maybe send them a re-engagement campaign. That’s maybe one, two, maybe three emails designed to just wake them back up and give them the last chance. If they don’t respond to those re-engagement emails that you send down after they’ve ignored you for 90 days. The best thing to do, if they’re not a past customer or someone who you know, is high value is to unsubscribe them. If they reach 90 days and they haven’t opened anything, stop mailing them. It’s a massive, massive mindset change. If you’re used to having a really big list, you’ve got to focus much more on quality rather than quantity.

Because if you do that, then you’ll find that your open rate starts to really increase. Because what we’re doing pretty much is we’re sending fewer emails, but we’re sending them to the people that are more likely to open. And you’ll typically find that maybe if you were getting a 20% open rate before, it could be as much as 40%, because the same people will open as we’re opening before. You’re just having to send a few emails to get that result. And then in return for that, because your open rate is higher than the Googles and Microsofts of this world will think that you’re sending out high quality emails, your reputation will improve. And then what I call the virtuous circle comes off where, because your reputation is better than the people that aren’t opening your emails. They’re more likely to see them London, the inbox, or they might see them.

And also really crucially. If you’re doing any kind of paid for advertising to build your email list, you’ll find that the new contacts that you’re paying for become much more likely to engage with you. And this is the real game changer. If you’re spending thousands of dollars a month on Facebook ads or something like that, if you’re not managing your engagement, you risk losing as much as half of your audience because your reputation isn’t good enough for the emails that you follow up with to get to them. If you fix your engagement management and get really, really passionate about only mailing the right people, you’ll find that you could get as much as 80% of your new leads, engaging with you. And that can double the return on investment you make in any kind of paid for ads. And even if you’re not paying for ads, then you know, you are still investing a lot of time growing your email list. So whatever happens, getting that engagement as high as possible means that you’re new people that joined the list are going to be so much more likely to engage with you and you’ll get much better return. And if you can manage that, and this is something that you have to change your mindset and do forever more than that will be transformational. That will make a huge difference to your email marketing.

Ziv:

Wow, that’s a lot to take in, but it is a mindset shift because you are now going to let go of people that are unengaged. And there is like the Adrian just painted the journey where you will basically monitor them at some point, move them into a weekly segment, right? And then after, uh, about 90 days, you will even remove them if they’re not strategic the mail or something. And that cleanup will immediately improve your reputation with those servers because more people are opening your emails and are engaging as a, before we go into understanding what is your software doing it? How does that help us save time? It makes decisions. I want to ask about the topic of reply replies. Like, is that something we, we want to engage? We want to like really focus on to try to get people to reply, or is it good enough if they click in our emails? And also if you can touch about the topic of email warmup, there are services out there that are claimed that they can warm up your email address if it’s brand new, what’s your, uh, input about

Adrian:

That. Okay. So replies first off replies are the, one of the best signs of engagement. There is the only area always worth encouraging your audience to reply to you. As long as you or a team member can then respond and engage with that reply. There’s nothing worse than asking for replies. And they then ignore you. That’s the worst possible thing that can happen because then you’re hurting your reputation rather than helping it. But in general, replies are really, really good from that perspective, getting people to open or click, you know, that’s the main thing, but if you can get them to reply, that’s a much better sign of engagement. The other thing to do as well to help there. And this is an education thing is the, one of the worst things you can do is your email London, the spam folder, and they don’t rescue it.

So when someone signs up to your list for the first time, you should always get them to go and check the spam folder. And if it’s in there, it’s crucial that they rescue the email from the spam folder at that point, rather than just leave it there, because that will be the biggest difference. And if your first email goes to spam and they don’t rescue it all the rest of them will probably go there as well. So they’re a little bit of education there. Now in terms of warming up email addresses, I’m, I’m a little bit old school with this because yes, there’s, there’s companies out there that will do this, but the thing is it’s not real people. And it is kind of in most cases, what they will do is they will send it to a kind of attain list of people that either people that are opening the emails or they were automatically reopening them and simulating an audience, and it will probably make a difference, but bearing in mind that in most cases, as long as you’re sending out high quality emails, anyway, then if you just organically grow your audience and the mailbox providers will treat you fairly leniently to start with.

So if you’re growing a list and you’re just adding to it a bit at a time, as long as it’s good content and good quality from the word go, then you will have a good reputation. You don’t necessarily need to artificially boost that because they don’t expect people to suddenly have 5,000 engaged people overnight. I think the challenge is if you’re going to be migrating an audience from one domain to another, then maybe there’s some kind of warmup you need. But in fairness, when I switched, I changed from my old we’d deliver domain to deliverability dashboard. And when I changed my domain over, I found that because I’d warned people that I was going to change in advance. And I said, look out for these new emails, look out for this address. And I found that I didn’t get much of a drop. So I’m sure there are times when having that the warm up service matters.

And I don’t think it hurts things, but I think in many cases you can achieve results yourself just by, by being sensible about it. Because at the end of the day, you know, anything out there that’s designed to gain the system. Let’s, let’s be honest. It, Google has invested millions, if not billions, in artificial intelligence. And they can tell when you’re trying to gain the system, I’ve known people switched domains to try and get away from their bad Google reputation and Google always catch up with them. They take the reputation of the new domain down as well. So I would say it’s much better just to do things the right way. Let it take a little bit longer because let’s face it in the world of business. There are no shortcuts. There are no, you know, anything that sounds too good to be true normally is so get the balance, right? But sometimes it might be worth it. I won’t completely say don’t because there’s always exceptions to every rule, but if you can actually just build your own audience, your own domain and warm up that address organically, I think that’s a better way.

Ziv::

Sweet. That sounds like a really responsible answer. And thank you for that. Tell me a little bit about the deliverability dashboard that you’ve developed in the many names people use it with in daily cookie, we use it and it gives us insights about who to email in what way does like an entire tagging mechanism inside. So I’ll give us a little bit about information about what is it that you do.

Adrian:

Sure. So, you know, as we said, engagement is one of the most important things and there’s no email platform out there yet that allows you to really get a handle on how well you’re managing your engagement at the big picture level. And that’s why I created the email health check, which is the main part of deliverability dashboard, because it will tell you very simply how well you’re managing your engagement and how you can improve things, because it looks at how your new contacts are engaging. It looks at how the behavior of your ordinance is changing over the last 30 days, the last 90 days, the last year. And based on that, it gives you a very simple score where zero is really bad, a hundred is really good. And you can understand that it’s a bit like a credit score or something like that. You just want to get it as high as possible.

And if you’ve got a low score, then it can give you tips as how to improve that. And it’s mainly by saying, you need to manage your engagement better. And then obviously if you then want to actually have more, hands-on help doing that. Then deliverability defender, which is another part of the dashboard, that’s got this tagging mechanism that will help you identify all the contacts that engaged within a certain timeframe. And then it’ll show you, here are the people you need to mail more frequently. Here are the people who need to mail less frequently and the tags make it super easy to do that because you don’t have to run lots of manual reports and set things up inside your email platform. And you know, the whole dashboard, it works with a lot of platforms already. It’s working with active campaign campaign monitor, constant contact, HubSpot Infusionsoft, keep MailChimp send in blue, and we’re adding new platforms all the time.

We’ve got a Weber coming. We have got a get response coming MailerLite is coming. We’re hoping for Ontraport. We’re just doing a bit of research into that at the moment. So the idea is we’re going to support as many platforms as possible. So it doesn’t matter which email platform you use. Then you be able to just get an independent view of how well you’re managing things. And if you need a little help behind that, then the paid-for defenders software can help with that as well. But the health check itself is totally free. It’s just email health check.net, and you gonna sign up and then you connect your platform up then. And it just monitors what your sending behavior has been like. It gives you a report based on that. So

Ziv:

We tell us again, where can we find the free?

Adrian:

So the health check for that is just email health check.net. And,

Ziv:

Uh, all it is just by going there is will gives you an indication about your engagement. That is really important. And with the defender add-on, that is affordably priced. You can actually get to the point where all of these logic, as we talked about the mindset shift of who do you send emails daily or multiple times a week, who do we send weekly or like a few times a month. And who do you basically go into an engagement campaign just to try to save the day with them with like a sequence of three emails. So then all the decision-making is done for you. All of the taxes done for you. You literally go into the situation where you can just have that stag. And it’s super simple to use, to return and to do some, to make some open rate magic in your email list in your CRM at the end, this has been so important to learn about these. And I want to ask you where can people learn more about you or connect with you or follow what it is

Adrian:

Firstly, thanks so much for inviting me to present this. I’ve really enjoyed it. So first off I’ve got a summary of everything I’ve talked about as well in the race method checklists, and you can get that from deliverability dashboard.com forward slash checklist. So that’s where you can download is that it’s a brief PDF. That’s got the most important parts of the race method, and you’re also welcome to connect with me on Facebook, facebook.com/adrian Savage. And I’ll always do my best to answer questions that come in or at least point people in the right direction. Because as I’ve said, I’m really, really keen to share this message as widely as I can. So if I can help in any way, always please get in touch, let me know,

Ziv:

Wasting so much money into paid advertisement where you don’t always have really control over what are you buying and how much is each of these clicks or whatnot. Spent some into understanding your deliverability situation with your email. You’re going to make a huge difference in your overall. If you do that in and can help you starting with, uh, his free tools, we’ll put all of the links, including the checklist in the show notes. Thank you again, Adrienne for being here and thank you everyone for listening to the Micro Niche Mastery podcast.

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.co, where can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting, a daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

The post Everything you need to know on Email Deliverability, with Adrian Savage (MNM Season 1 Episode 6) appeared first on Daily Cookie.

Welcome to the fifth episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest today is Troy Broussard, a storyteller, serial entrepreneur, and a master in Infusionsoft.

troybroussard.com

dailycookie.co

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Welcome to the micro niche mastery podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host. He is so busy coaching business owners on niching down and launching that he wants to do 20 sessions in one day, Ziv Raviv

Ziv:

Hello, and welcome to the Micro niche mastery podcast. I’m so excited to have here with me, a serial entrepreneur and really amazing guy, very supportive guy that helps other people in Micro niches to go to fly the author of the book, confusion mastery, and the keto have multiple trainings that help people not just go through automations and marketing and the smart usage of Infusionsoft, but also the through teaching copywriting. Even though I think you mentioned it, [inaudible] the official copy, like the type of copywriter, and yet other copywriters tend to appreciate your walk and learn from you and study your work. So I’m so excited to have you here with us, Lloyd. Hi, Troy. How are you?

Troy:

Thank you so much live. It’s really nice being here. And I thank you for inviting me on the show and yeah. You know, I would never use the word copywriter to describe myself. I’ve never written copy professionally for others. I only write for myself, but I have a lot of copywriters that have reached out and told me I got good copies. So, but I consider myself to be a story seller. And that’s the way I look at it is that I use stories and good storytelling principles and turn that into a selling principle, right? So I refer to it as story selling, and that is something that I’ve been a practitioner of for years. And as you know, on my list, you know, I send out at least one email a day, sometimes two or three, and it’s something that if you’re a good storyteller, you really don’t have to be a great copywriter.

And I think that’s one of the reasons that, you know, even the training I did on it, I called the contrarian copywriting course. Right? I did it as a contrarian because I think as a technologist that I am, a lot of people are fearful that if they’re not a professional copywriter, they can’t do a good job with this. And that’s just so ridiculous. I have seen numerous times where in different businesses that I’ve been a part of or joint ventures or managed in the past where we bring in a professional copywriter, pay him $50,000 for the sales letter and it just bombs. And the reason is that even though he’s a pro, he doesn’t have the relationship with the list and he doesn’t know how to talk with that audience in a way that resonates with them like somebody that’s writing daily emails. So I think that the tip of the iceberg with all of this is starting with daily email. If you work on that and get your repetitions up and get used to doing it and doing the story selling approach, then it’s going to naturally lend itself to deeper connections with your list and higher conversions on your sales. So then the copy kind of works itself out through the repetition and the practitioner approach of just doing the work on a daily basis.

Ziv:

One of the biggest questions we get about the topic of daily emails is like, what would you write about how can you find the topics to write about every single day to your list? What would you say to that?

Troy:

Oh, it is so easy. It’s so easy. You just have to switch gears and let me explain it this way we have right and left brain, right? We have this duality of how we think, and the problem that most people struggle with when they’re trying to write is they’re trying to think of what to write at the time that they’re trying to write. And that’s not what you want to do. Those are two discreetly different and separate topics. So what you want to get really good at is brainstorming ideas to write about. And that is the only thing you do in that time. All you do is jot down a bunch of ideas. And then when you go to write, you just look at that list and the one that jumps off the page for you, you know, the one that’s just easy, that’s the one you do.

And you know, when I first started writing daily emails, it would take me like 40 minutes to write an email because I was just, it was like pulling teeth to get through the process for me. Now I probably write them in seven minutes or less. They just go flying out the door and it doesn’t take any effort. It’s like second, I was just like breathing. It’s just normal, right? I mean, how hard is it to teach yourself the habit of brushing your teeth? You do it every day. It’s just what you do. Well, once it becomes habitual, once it becomes just part of who you are, then it’s really easy. And especially when you do a story selling type approach, because it’s just conversational. And if you just imagine talking to somebody in the backyard that you’re having a barbecue with and having that conversation and keeping it into a one-on-one tone, like, you know, not preaching at an audience, but just talking to one person and just telling them a story, that’s all it really takes.

So what I do is really simple, super, super simple. I have a ton of processes that I do, but they’re ultra ultra simplistic. And I just use my phone and I use the iPhone and I use a little notes app on the iPhone, and it has little tasks lists that you can create. And you can just create a little task on there. I have just this massive list of emails. And during the day, while I’m sitting in traffic, while I’m out at the bank, waiting in line, whatever, any downtime that I have, I’m writing down ideas for emails. And during a given day, I’ll jot down way more ideas than I write. And so then it becomes really easy, but you have to separate the process of idea generation from writing. And when you make that one single simple distinction, then everything just falls, falls in place for you. It really does.

Ziv:

I love it. And this is like the, the whole philosophy of creating a content plan is that you don’t wing it with content. You actually plan it. And even with the simplistic approach that you shared, which is just to have a list and continually brainstorming and expanding that list, it’s already way, way easier and sets you up for success. So I want to ask you about some productivity tips, because going down from 40 to seven minutes is, is a process that includes a lack of practice, but also your master in being productive. And you’ve been sharing some ideas about this in your course. And then in other programs, can you show us like what works for you these days, except for the planning and the brainstorming, what helps you walk in, in a productive way when it comes to email mark?

Troy:

Cool. So I’ve done it a few different ways and it just depends. I have a, some pretty severe neck damage. And so there are times during the year when I can’t be on the computer at all, might go a couple of weeks without getting in front of a computer screen. And so I’ve mastered the ability to dictate my email content as well, but it’s its own art form and it takes a lot of practice and people struggle with that when they first start doing it as well, because they just want to talk and record it and think that that’s what it is about. That’s not the way I do it. I audibly write if that makes any sense. I write out the sentences audibly. So it still has all the sentence structure. It’s not just like a conversation that I’m recording. I’m narrating the email, I’m writing it audibly.

And that way I have virtually no editing and I can just do it through the rev app and transcribe it and get it back, paste it in and go. The other thing that I’ve found that’s really, really productive for me is to have a super fast streamlined way of sending emails when you use complex systems. And a lot of the CRMs are very complex. Infusionsoft, Ontraport, HubSpot, active campaign, even a Weber is pretty simple. But when you look at how many steps it takes you to go through to actually send an email, it’s pretty absurd, right? And honestly, my partner and I are building an entire platform for this called [inaudible] mail that we’ll be launching in the next, you know, a little bit, depending on when you’re listening to this recording, but it may already be out depending on when you’re listening, but it’s coming very soon.

And it’s really focused on speed because when you are a producer of content, when you’re a writer and you’re writing daily emails, you want to be able to get them out quickly. And so do not get distracted by pretty formatting and images and all that crazy stuff. You’re on my list. You see, I don’t send images. I don’t do formatting. It’s just plain text and go. And a lot of people think that that’s unsexy and it’s unprofessional and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reality is it’s just the opposite. How do all of your friends write to you an email? When your friends send you an email, they don’t like format it properly and they don’t put images. They don’t worry about grammar and punctuation. It’s just a stream of consciousness and it’s quick and it’s fast. And that’s the way that I write. And it is an approach that honestly does make you stand out because when everybody else is trying to focus on pretty, you’re focusing on actually building a relationship with your readers by providing great content that they want to read. And if they want to read your content, it doesn’t matter how many pretty images or fonts you use or any of that crazy stuff. That’s all a distraction, right? If you’ve ever read a great novel, great fiction, once you’re in engaged in it, you just can’t put it down. And there’s no pretty images. There’s no pretty formatting and fonts. It’s just text on a page, but the text, the copy is drawing you in. And that’s why I really recommend people do that. It’s faster. And it creates more deep relationships with your readers.

Ziv:

 But what

If we don’t have like a good stories? How can we come up with this?

Troy:

Oh, everybody’s got stories. Everybody’s got stories. It’s a really simple process of just looking at things you see around you that are going on and just learning to ask better questions of yourself. I’m sitting here right now. And I know that this is just going to be an audio podcast, but I do everything for video. That’s the way I do. And as you see, I’ve got my uniform on. I call it my uniform, but it’s the same thing that I wear all the time. A black turtleneck I’m prepped. I’ve got multiple lights here, lighting this set. I’ve got a 4k camera video capturing everything with a $3,000 camera and a blurred background on this video, all of this for an audio interview, right? An audio interview. Why? Because I believe in this concept of managing the talent. And if I show up and I’m looking into this whole set, then that brings my a game.

That’s what helps me stay directed and focused. Right? So if I’m sitting here and I’m looking at these lights, I can tell you a whole story about why I spent $300 on the light and another $300 on a light stand for quality. And I can go into a whole thing about why you’re better off spending for high quality and how I have three other lights that I throw away that I wear like 75 to a hundred bucks, a piece that I’ve wasted more money buying cheap than had I bought high quality from the beginning. That’s a story, right? And you can just go into it. I can sit here and look at my camera and look at the quick connection on the Mount. Every one of my tripods and camera mounts, and I have a bunch of them. They all have the exact same Joby Mount on them that I use. Why that’s a story behind that. That’s a story about speed and efficiency and consistency. All of these things turn into something that you can talk about, and then you can connect it at the end, connected into your business, into your offer, make a little pivot and, and switch that around. But I could sit here and write you a hundred emails, just looking around the room right now. I see a story in every,

Ziv:

I want to talk.

About the segue that you described. So I like you can, you can literally like find the story in anything around you, in anything in your life and like analyze it, see the values, the decision-making, the backstory, the direction, the vision, everything. But, uh, you also segue into a sale and some people are afraid about selling.

Troy:

Yeah. Because they’re trying to sell, I don’t try to sell. I talk to you. I give you a story. I make a connection and then say, Hey, if you’re interested in more about this, go here. Like, I’m not doing a heavy sales pitch. You see that in my emails, if you’re pitching hard every day, you’re going to push people away. But if you’re just making a casual offer to go deeper in the conversation that you’ve opened up with them, it’s really easy, right? It’s a really easy transition. And you know, that’s exactly the way I do it. I wrote a, an email today and it was about, do you have to really worry about the content or the presentation, right? Because a lot of people will say, well, it’s all in the content, but if your presentation sucks, that’s not true. If this audio is distorted and nobody can hear it.

And I’ve got a fan kicking on in the background and you can’t hear my voice clearly, then the content might be great, but it’s not going to matter because the presentation screws it up. Right. And so I went on this whole discussion about content and presentation, and I gave examples of audio, et cetera. And then at the end, right at the end, I said, you know, and don’t make the Cardinal sin. The Cardinal sin is trying to make the presentation so perfect. You never get the content done. Right. And so what I talked about then was how I did just that and a former newsletter that I had and how I used to have a print newsletter that was color and like a magazine. And it got to be such a chore to make it so perfect that I stopped doing it. Right. And then what was the offer?

Well, by the way, today, I’m selling the back issues of that newsletter in PDF form. I don’t have the printed version anymore, but if you’d like to get the entire year, here’s where you go. And by the way, it’s, you know, $756 off today. Boom, simple, right? It’s like a whole lesson and it’s all teaching. But yet I knew that I was going to make an offer for the back issues of the PDFs. So my newsletter. And so I just related that story and turned it into a pain point. The more emotional pain points that you can get into your stories better because it’s going to resonate with people more. And the more you can do them in a self-deprecating way. So I wasn’t pound in my chest, look how good I am, look how good I was. Like, don’t make the mistake I made. Right? Like don’t. And so I’m falling on the sword. In my story, my story is self-deprecating and it’s painful. And that allows people to connect and resonate and feel like, Hey, this guy is, you know, he’s real. He makes mistakes too. He’s talking about him, he’s helping me out. Here’s some examples and that’s it. So I think that the people overthink that transition and they overthink having to sell. You really don’t have to sell. You just have to make an offer to continue working with you.

Ziv:

Tell me a little bit about what excites you these days in terms of your businesses.

Troy:

Oh man, it’s all about software for me. My partner, Ben settle. He calls me the software supremacist because everything I do is software. I run five different companies were, uh, just opened the bank account on one yesterday. And I love software. I look at it today as the new continuity model, right? Membership sites have been around for close to two decades at this point. Right? And what has happened is it’s just getting harder and harder and harder to do them. And the market is very mature around them, but tools, I love selling tools. Everybody wants tools and what’s beautiful about it is they’re so easy to sell. It’s so easy to sell software because when you’re selling information, you have to hold back, right? You gotta be careful about crossing that line. You want to talk about what you do, but you don’t want to show them how you do it because otherwise they’re not going to buy it, right?

So you have to, you have to really kind of dance this line, providing value, but not teaching, but when it comes to software, I can tell you everything. I can just roll up the sleeves, open book. You show you everything, teacher. It doesn’t matter because unless you buy the software, you’re not going to be able to do it. And so it’s a really kind of fun way to sell without really having to sell and the stick rates when you develop good software that people really want and need the retention is insane with it. So it allows you to month over month, build your business. So I love continuity income. I love membership. I love retention. I have my own monthly book subscription that I do my memoirs of mastery program, uh, where I do a six by nine, 150 page book every month that I write.

So I like a lot of different models, but continuity is king. And all of my businesses have continuity or multiple continuity programs in them. Because once I get a customer, I want to go deep with that customer. And I want to keep getting income from them. I don’t want to have to make the sale all the time. Right? It’s so much easier to sell to an existing customer. Don’t keep fighting to make that first sale and convert somebody on your list. I get that first sale. And then I focus on going deep, deep, deep in the relationship.

Ziv:

Well, tell me a little bit about what you do to help people in the online courses, Mako niche, like every course, it can be a later be launched in an, in a, my Cornish where people notice you, but what do you do in this arena?

Troy:

I’m really well-known for infusion soft. I was probably at the time, I’m not doing it now, but at the time I was probably the top two or three in the world with infusion soft. And that is a perfect example of a micro-niche right. It’s also a perfect example of a parasitic niche. A parasitic niche, a parasite is somebody is a little bug or creature that gets its life from a larger animal, right? So whales have all these parasites that attached to them. Well, if the whale wasn’t there, the parasites would die, right? And parasitic companies are great ways to get into micro niching, right? You can become an expert around a product or around a surface or a service that’s already out there. And well-known, and now you’re just kind of leveraging off of that, finding some things that you can do better and improve upon or consult or teach on in that area.

Troy:

And B form that peracetic, you know, micro-niche type business. Now. I love it because it’s always easier to be a big fish if you’re in a small pond and that’s, you know exactly what I did. You held it up earlier on before we kicked off the call with my book from Infusionsoft mastery. Right? Well, that is a great, great way to dominate a micro niche. And I’ve got to tell you, there is so much power in being the best-selling author in your micro niche. And if I were still in Infusionsoft, I know I’m not a part of it really anymore. And I don’t really do anything with it anymore. I do my own software platforms and actually building a competitive platform now. So I don’t really swim in those waters, shall we say anymore? But if I did, I would have a dozen books around Infusionsoft so that people would just be in Nam or with all of the content that I provide there.

And to give you an example, when the last infusion soft conference that I went to, they had, they used to have, they don’t have it anymore, but they used to have an annual conference called infusion con. And the last time I went there, they were listening to the CEO speak. And there was about, I don’t know, 3,500 people or so in the audience. And the CEO is speaking and he opens it up for questions. And two of the first three questions that were asked people, quoted my book and referenced it and said, such CEO, Triber Sarde said this and that. Yeah. What do you think about that? And I was like, wow, that’s, that’s pretty cool. It was neat to see, because when you dominate an individual niche, you kind of have this superstar status and it’s easy to attain that if you know what you’re doing, right.

And it’s just so much easier than competing. Now, if I had gone out and tried to do that same thing and something much larger like Salesforce, I wouldn’t have had a chance of elevating that quickly. It’s too big of an issue. It’s too big of a platform, right? But with something like Infusionsoft, I was able to go in there and carve out a spot for me and move to the top very, very fast. And that’s one of the advantages of micro niches, but to be Uber successful with the micro niche, you need to be strong, confident, bold, and you need to lead by example and you need to be prolific. You need to put a lot of content out there, you know, get a couple of books out there, whatever you need to do, but, but raise your status in that micro niche. And don’t ever believe people that  

One of my companies and this, I don’t own this company anymore, I sold out of it. But one of my companies, a few years ago, I had only 720 people on that list. And it was doing over 700,000 a year in revenue. So when people tell you all, I’ve got to have a 25,000 person list, and now I’ve got to have a 200,000 personally. That’s not true at all. If you know how to go deep in the relationship and you know how to offer larger ticket pricing, which is something that in micro niches is extremely effective, being a coach or consultant and a micro-niche where you can offer top tier pricing, man, I’m telling you the sky’s the limit. It’s just your ability to, to ask for it.

Zivi:

Where can people learn more about what you do these days?

Troy:

The best way is to just go to Troybroussard.com. It’s my last name is spelled kind of awkward. It’s B R O U S S a R D, but Troy broussard.com and just opt in there. My list I email every day, I can guarantee you that it’s business related marketing related content every single day. And I have so many different companies that I just funnel everything through my personal daily email. Otherwise that’d be writing five emails a day. I don’t have time for that. So the best way is just in my personal brand. Troy broussard.com,

Zivi:

How you keep it simple also with your daily emails, because a lot of people are considering, well, should I have one daily email for this segment? And one daily email for that segment? Can you just keep it simple? And everyone enjoys what you hide, even if they already bought something that you mentioned.

Troy:

Yeah. You know what really, that’s the best advice for anybody. Keep it as simple as possible. And people are all worried about the segmentation and customers versus non-customers. And what have you promote an offer that they’ve already seen before? Well, I do a couple of things. My offers are always increasing on a product. So if I sell it now at this price, when I saw it six months from now, it’ll be more expensive. So I never have to worry about somebody seeing a better price or something like that. So that is just cured. It’s eliminated by the nature of how I do the promotion. But the second thing is I sent out an email yesterday about a guy that bought one of my products. I was selling the product and he had already bought it. And he wrote me an email. He says, oh, thanks so much for reminding me.

I got to go back and go through that again. It was so great content. So when you’re selling a product, even if your list is already bought it, you’re still selling them. You’re selling them on consuming what they already bought, and you’re selling them on the concept that they’re a smart person because they already bought it. And I know that sounds silly, but people don’t like to be made to feel stupid and they like to feel smart. And so when you sell them something, they already bought it, reaffirms to them. Hey, I’m a pretty smart guy. I bought this, but now I need to go back and go through it again. Right? So that’s, you know, just a very simplistic approach. You don’t have to make this stuff complicated, just get out there and do it every day. And

Zivi:

There’s so much to discuss, uh, with you. You’re, you’re such a fountain of wisdom on, on copywriting and on welcome sequences and automation. I think that if you, uh, wrote a book about automation in general, instead of on Infusionsoft mastery, maybe we would not have this conversation right now, but you, you go multiple businesses by figuring out how to get noticed. And I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing this with us. What is one tip that you would give to yourself? If you could talk with younger Troy, What would that be?

Troy:

I would just say set aside fear and just do it. I wrote that book that you’re holding that book has made me over $327,000 at last count and not from the book sales, but from all of the backend sales that it created. And I sat there for a year after it was written before I ever published it, that probably cost me 75, $85,000, you know, just by not releasing it. So just get out there and do it. And you know what you said there about had I written a general book? It wouldn’t have been the same thing. Now I can write the general book. Okay. Because I prove myself in the Infusionsoft niche, I established myself there. I elevated to the top of that in the industry now to go out and write just a marketing automation book that is general. I have the street cred to pull that off. Right. But a lot of people start at the general first and it’s just not the way to go. Always dominate a niche first and then go wider, go deep before you go wide.

Ziv:

Love it. Thank you so much. And we’ll put the link to your website. [inaudible] dot com in the show notes, in case someone is listening, you could go that there there’s so much to learn from your toy. Thank you so much again, I’ll see you online.

Troy:

Thank you. All right. Thank you. I appreciate the invite. Take care.

This show was brought to you by Dailycookie.co, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting and daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

The post The Story Seller and when to go Macro, with Troy Broussard (MNM Season 1 Episode 5) appeared first on Daily Cookie.

Welcome to the fourth episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest today is Angela Brown from savvycleaner.com, who now owns a member-site empire after selling a 25-year professional house cleaning business. 

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

savvycleaner.com

funnycleaningshirts.com

dailycookie.co

Welcome to the micro niche mastery podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he runs six businesses and all of them include a podcast in their growth strategy, Ziv Raviv

Ziv:

Hello, and welcome to the micro niche mastery podcast. I am here excited to share with you the story of Angela Brown from savvycleaner.com. After 25 years of professional house cleaning as a business and she decided in 2015 to sell her business and start an online venture into YouTube and podcast, she was able to find an audience, create an audience, and also create a successful online courses business in the membership site, and even a t-shirt a funny cleaning t-shirt business. So let’s hear all about it. Hello, Angela.

Angela:

Well, hello there. And thank you so much for having me today. I’m super excited to be on your show.

Zivi:

Thank you so much. And you’ll now in North Carolina when we’re doing this interview in your home. And can you tell us a little bit about the moments that might’ve been, not an easy decision to sell your business in 2015?

Angela:

Yes. Thank you. I was a professional house cleaner for 25 years and we had one of the largest independently owned cleaning companies in north and South Carolina. And we had a troubled teenager that came to live with us in the summer of 2015. And it was a pivotal moment for us because she was destructive and suicidal and violent. And I couldn’t let her around anyone because she would assault them. And I couldn’t take her to customers’ homes because she would steal from them. So I had literally 24 7 care in order to help her save her life. And so I had to stay at home and my business was out and about in the service in the field. And so I had to decide, what do I know that I can work from home? And that became well, what God gave me and what’s in front of me is that I know how to clean.

And so I can create a training course on how to clean and I can sell that online. The only problem was I’d never really spent any time online. I was just learning how to type. I didn’t have any social media accounts. I didn’t know how the internet worked. I just kind of hoped it would all go away. And when it didn’t, I decided to embrace it. So I sold my business in 2015 and I ventured into the online space and I started learning as much as I could, as fast as I could from YouTube videos on how to start a business, how to grow a YouTube business, how to start a YouTube channel. And I realized that to get out to my audience, the quickest, fastest marketing for me was going to be able to create a YouTube channel. And I’d never anything like that before.

And so it wasn’t just let me learn the internet, but it’s like now I’ve got to learn how to make a video. And I’ve got to learn how to edit the video. And I’ve got to learn how to upload the video. Oh, what’s this thing called SEO. And there’s all this stuff to learn. It was one of the most challenging, interesting and innovative times of my life.

Zivi:

Did you start with the podcast as well immediately? Or did you take some time before you started that?

Angela:

That’s a great question. My philosophy has always been work smart, not hard. And so I started thinking to myself before I ever started a YouTube show or a podcast. What does this look like? Five years down the road in five years? Will I wish I would have started a podcast in five years? Will I wish I would have started the YouTube show in which comes first?

Is it possible that I could do them both simultaneously? And because I didn’t have any skills in either market, I’m learning them both at the same time. I said, well, I’ll teach myself them both at the same time. So from day one, I decided that I would do the podcast first, but I would record in front of a camera because at first I was just a talking head show and my philosophy is do what you can, where you are. And at the time I was one person, I was the director, the creator, the producer, the talent, the editor, the everything. And so what can I do? And what I can do is I can stand in one spot in front of a camera with lights and I can, I can answer questions. And so if you were going to jump into the house cleaning business, what questions would you ask?

And I sat down and I wrote about 50 questions that people would ask a startup business. Then what I did is I dedicated one show to each answer. So my shows are short, they’re five to eight minutes each, but that is the perfect time. If a house cleaner is driving from their home to a job in the morning to listen to a little bit of motivation for cleaning for the day. So that was my audience. That was my goal because my show is for cleaning business owners. So to answer your question, I started out from day one with both a podcast and a YouTube show. So I clip a microphone on my lapel. I stand in front of the camera and I recorded the show. Then what I’ve done is I’ve edited the audio version and that goes to become the podcast. Then it snaps together with the video and it goes to YouTube to become a YouTube show.

Then once it goes to YouTube, we send it off to rev and they do transcriptions word verbatim of the show itself. Then we take that and I send it now to an editor in the beginning. I did it all myself, but I now have help. I send it to an editor and they create a blog out of it. So every day we have three original pieces of content, which is a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube show. And so people can watch or listen. However they want. The cool thing is that we link them all together for search engine optimization. And so it took me 39 days to really figure out the search engine optimization of it. And then we’ve been number one, two and three for the search engine terms of the day ever since day 39 on our podcast. And we’re now 1,130 episodes in God.

Zivi:

I wasn’t sure if you meant every day. And I realized it like really half a day and like, oh my God, that is a lot of content and very, very impressive story of like how you repurpose or like yeah. Generate multiple pieces of content, which is so important. I’m dying to ask you about the business side of things. But before we go there, tell me about your email list and how it grew during those years.

Angela:

So I knew that email marketing was going to be really important for me. And for this reason, at the time that I jumped into the online space, everybody was changing their rules a lot. And so I realized that no matter who changes, what rules I need to have a website and I need to have email that way. It’s my playground. And I can send everything out from my hub.

And then all the social media that we do can come back to my hub, but I need a hub of my own. And so we hooked up an automated email marketing program, and I had no idea how it worked. It wasn’t until about a year end of the business, where I started having a little bit more breathing room when I started to hire some people. And I started to outsource some stuff that I looked at my email marketing and I had a 200,000 people on an email list. And then I was like, who are all these people? And where did they come from? And every time we produced something like 10 tips for this or five tips for this in the podcast, we’d often say, Hey, there’s a freebie in the notes below. And so check it out. People would click on it. And then it would send them to this thing where they could download either a worksheet or a checklist or some, a flyer or something like that for their business.

So we ended up building this huge email list, and I hate to say this I’m so embarrassed, but in the beginning I had, I had no newsletter to send to them. I had no way to really follow up with that. And so I was like, oh, there’s another piece of software I have to learn. And so I had to dig in and I had to figure out how you do broadcasts and sequences and all that kind of stuff. But my philosophy is this. You have to nurture the email list that you have. And so right now you’d mentioned earlier that we sell t-shirts. We do resell funny cleaning shirts @funnycleaningshirts.com. But the cool thing is we only announce a winner. We give away a free t-shirt every single day. We only announced the winner inside the email. So we’ve trained people now every day to open up their email and say, did I win?

And so every day they’re in front of us every single day. And at the bottom of the email, we’re not selling anything nothing’s for sale at the bottom of the email. There’s one link that says new stuff, that’s happening this week at savvy cleaner, which is our other business. And when people click on that, then they’re led over to our courses and the other things that we have for sale. So it’s not a heavy sales pitch at all. It’s this fun, oh, Hey, here’s the funny cleaning shirt of the day. The people will just click on it just for inspiration. And they’re like, oh, I’d like to win that. Or I’d like to win that for my cleaning lady. And so that is our email nurture. But if people are not opening your email, you do not have an email list. You have a collection of data that is useless.

You got to get people to click every single day or frequently so that they remember you and you can stay in front of them.

Zivi:

This is the, just, uh, so good to hear you say that. So tell me a little bit about how you’ve developed the business side of this. Cause what you do create takes a lot of time to build up, to create all this content, but I’m sure that you got to really better in the process. So that now, like nowadays, how long does it take to produce the core content?

Angela:

 Well, I’m still in the business full-time and I say in the business full-time because right now we’ve hired in the last few years, as I could afford to hire people. And we’ve monetized the YouTube show 14 different ways. And so as we’ve been able to monetize the show, I’ve been able to hire more people.

And so I’m still in the business. Hands-on because every single thing that I do, I ask myself this question, am I the best person for this job? And the answer is often like, no, not at all. So then how quickly can I learn this job so that I can put together a little package of what this job is and then I can outsource it to someone else. And so I have lots of packets and my packets are now up on the website. And if you’ve been invited to be part of our team, there’s a website where you can go and you can pick up a packet and the packet will say something like here’s a project of, and I’m just throwing this out there. 20 graphic images that we will use for a Facebook group that say something like, Hey, welcome to our group. You’re going to make 20 of those graphic images for me underneath that.

It says level of importance on a scale of one to 10, how important is this project? Is this a number 10 projects? Like our YouTube shows that go live every day. That’s a number 10 project that has a deadline to it, a graphic image for a welcome message for YouTube or a Facebook group that might be a number five or a number three. And so if you do it today, that’s great, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it. If you don’t get to it today. And so people will jump in and they will pick their packages based on, you know, are they going to be able to turn it in today or do they need a couple of days lead time or whatever. And then I say, this is the process that you will need. And so, and these are all independent contractors that we will outsource them to, but it will say you’ll need Photoshop or Canva or PicMonkey or something like that.

And we specify what you’re going to need a computer, internet access, a Dropbox folder, or a Google drive folder. And then people look at it and they’ll say, oh yes, I have all of these tools. Okay, great. I’d be good for this project. I have this set of skills. And so once they’ve determined that they’re a good fit for that, then I always put my price. The price is negotiable. If somebody wants to negotiate it, but we, we dish out a lot of this stuff to fiber, for example. And so once I’ve put together my package, I’m a hundred percent clear what I’m looking for. And now I’m a hundred percent clear of what it looks like when it comes back to me. And there’s always a deadline. Like we do all of our payroll for independent contractors and employees Sunday night at 6:00 PM. So if your project is turned into me Sunday night by 6:00 PM, then you get paid.

Angela:

And if you don’t, you have to wait til the following week. And so that way we’re not cutting checks all during the week, randomly spinning our wheels, doing crazy stuff. Everything’s on a really tight system.

Zivi:

So with what the actual contents, the daily podcast, how long does it take for you to actually record?

Angela:
It really depends on the type of show. It usually takes anywhere from, I don’t know, maybe about a half hour to record a five to eight minute show and that’s to pull together the questions and the content that I have, and to make sure that the lights are set up right. And that I recorded it properly. And then as soon as I record it, it goes to processing where I do a couple of presets and I set it up a certain way. And then I pass it off to one of our editors.

Then when, and we use a Google keep file, which keeps everything in line. And it has a list, a checklist of all these different things that need to be done once that editor is done, she’ll send it back to me through Dropbox folder. And so I’m going to check in later on in the day after it’s been edited, and then I’m going to check off that she’s done and make sure that that goes in her list for being paid. Like I approved that she did this show and then it goes off to our podcast editor. Who’s going to make sure that the podcast is up and running. And then the blog editor, that’s going to make sure the blog has done. And then also somebody uploads it to YouTube and does all the SEO and everything on that as well. So there are several stops along the way.

And so to say, it takes all of a half hour. That’s really not true because I’m in and out of the show four or five times a day, the problem is, and this is where it gets tricky for me, we’re working on 15 to 20 shows at a time. So we’re a couple of weeks out working in advance. So at any given day, I will jump in and out of like 20 different shows. And so if I walk away right now, I cannot tell you for the life of me, what should I do is came off. Even if I just watched it, I can’t tell you.

Zivi:

Wow. So you have this like very old machine by now of how to produce a daily show that is successful. The tail gets a lot of people’s attention, and then there’s also a business to add money to make. Uh, so what is your number one moneymaking service or product?

Angela:

So our number one moneymaker are the courses that we’ve created and the courses are on how to start your house cleaning business, but it’s a membership. And so we have people that join the membership and it’s, we have two memberships, we have one for employees and one for employers. And so if you’re just getting started in the cleaning business, you’ll probably go through the business one because it teaches you how to set up a business and how to set up your LLC and trademark your logo and all those kinds of things. And then also on the training side, it’s going to teach you the training end of it, as well, which is training and certification, which are like chemical safety and personal protective equipment and all that kind of stuff that you need to know as a house cleaner.

And then when you start hiring people, you are busy as an entrepreneur. You don’t have time to stop and train them. So then you bring your train, your employees through the training program, where they learn about chemical safety and how to wash your equipment between jobs and stuff like that. And so it’s a really great program, but that’s where we make the bulk of our money is from the recurring subscription of our membership site.

Zivi:

And do you offer anything like coaching or group coaching or anything of that sort

Angela:

Part of our membership? We have, we started out calling it group coaching and we just switched a couple of weeks over and now we call it group mastermind. And the mastermind concept is a little bit from just group coaching in the group coaching. It was just me answering questions, but what we’ve determined and decided was that collectively we’re smarter as a group.

And so as a mastermind group, we let other members jump in and say, well, I tried this and here’s what worked for me. And someone else will jump in and say, I tried that and I liked it, but I tweaked one thing and it worked for me better. And we use the Toastmaster system where we have timing lights. So you have one to two and a half minutes to give your answer and then you’re cut off and it’s the next person. So that works.

Zivi

That’s interesting. So tell me more about the, like the t-shirt business. Like where did that come from and is it like a money-making business for you?

Angela:

I’m, I’m glad you asked that question. And the answer is no, it’s not a big money maker for us at all. We sell 40 to 70 t-shirts a day and that’s not a lot of money compared to how much money we’re spending to keep it afloat.

And so it’s completely a marketing expense for me right now. And I’m taking it out of my marketing budget for here’s, how it started when we got onto YouTube, somebody came to us and said, would you like your own, your own clothing line? And I said, no, that is not part of our business model. And I think it’s really important in any micro niche to know exactly what you offer and what you don’t. And what we don’t do is we do not warehouse inventory or ship products. We do not warehouse inventory or ship anything. We’re just not equipped to do it. It’s not part of our future. We’re not doing it. So they asked me for a clothing line and I could just see boxes of stuff in my garage. I’m like, no, we’re not, no. And so, uh, somebody came to me a few months later and they said, what if we did print on demand where you gave to us the graphics?

And we did all the printing, the fulfillment, the shipping, we took the orders. We did the customer service and the returns. And I said, whoa, tell me more. And so I got really interested in the print on demand concept. Well, we jumped in and did that for about six months and we didn’t really make any money at it. We didn’t really know how the t-shirt business works or how online commerce works or any of that stuff. And then during COVID, we had a lot of our people take off and go home because their kids were now at home. And so I had a graphic designer that said, do you have any extra work for me that I can do at home? And I said, do you wanna make some t-shirt graphics? And we both kind of jumped into learn the t-shirt business at that time, what we decided was if we were going to embrace it, we had to really embrace it full on.

And so what does that mean? So I started taking online courses on how do you grow a t-shirt business? And what does that mean? And how do you get on Amazon and how do you sell your stuff worldwide? And how do you ship it worldwide? If the, if the airlines are not going to other places like you got shipping issues. And so what we discovered really quickly is you can’t sell a product. Nobody knows about. So we decided, because here’s the thing. When you have a course, it’s really hard every day to head up an audience every single day, to try to sell them a course, Hey, buy my course, buy my course, buy my course. So after a couple of days, they’re going to get sick of you. And so we had to figure out a way what’s creative, innovative, and fun, where people will open our emails every day.

We’re like the t-shirt business let’s let’s sell t-shirts. So in order to get to the next level of Amazon, Amazon has all these weird rules. You have to sell so many shirts that, you know, you have to sell so many, like they’ll give you 10 shirts. You got to sell 10 different varieties or 10 different designs before you can get to the 25. And you’ve got to sell 25 of the designs in order to get it to a hundred. And they have this weird tear process. So we decided in order to get through the tiers, we would buy our own shirts to qualify for that next tier. And so what happened was we decided to give away that one shirt that we bought every day. And so we made the announcement every day. Here’s a new shirt, which meant we had to create a new shirt every day.

So every single day we’ve come out with now 575 designs since it’s COVID of last year. And these are all original. One of a kinds of t-shirts that are funny cleaning shirts for house cleaning. So then what happened is we gave a shirt away. We would make the announcement. And like I said, at the bottom, there’s one link that will link people back over to our courses. And so that is the marketing for our course. What is so weird is this though, I cannot tell you how many people have one or a free t-shirt, but then suddenly, and mysteriously show up in our courses, they weren’t members. They were not part of our email list before they this an ad or something for a t-shirt. And we are running Facebook ads right now for the t-shirts. And then when people sign up mysteriously, then they joined and our membership is not expensive.

It’s like 64 95 a month, but we’ll do the math on this. You give someone a free t-shirt one time and they join a recurring membership as $65 a month. And they pay over and over and over and over again, the math works out on that all day, right? That’s a really good way to do that. So it’s, it was just an innovative way for us to experience creativity. And one of the things that was kind of a sidebar that we didn’t pay a lot of attention to, but when you’re creating a t-shirt every day, you’re really juicing up your creativity. You get really creative every fast every day. And then you start thinking in terms of comedy, like, Aw, that’s so funny. That should be on a t-shirt. So it’s boosted our creativity. It’s boosted our humor. It’s really forced us to learn our email marketing program.

It’s forced us to learn Facebook ads. So every element of your business is going to teach you a new set of skills that no matter where you go, or how you pivot in your business, you’re going to use those to build your business, you know, in another area, what I recommend it. Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the funnest things we’ve ever done, and we’ve built a lot of Goodwill as a result of it. We’ve had lots and lots of people wearing our brand shirts. Now out in the market.

Zivi:

Speaking of Goodwill, you have recently tell me a little bit about that.

Angela:

Well, the mobile app came as an accident. I do a lot of quality control, and so I had an appointment and I was sitting out in my car waiting to be called in so that they don’t let you inside the waiting rooms.

Now, still because of COVID. And I was sitting there taking one of my courses on my smartphone. And every time I tried to log in, we have lots of resources. I click on a resource and it would bump me out of the program. And so then I would log back in, but I had to type in the URL and then I had to type in my email and then I had to type in the password. And then I was back inside the course and I had to sort through and open up the course and okay, now I’m back in. And then I would click on a few things and I clicked on a reference just to see if it worked, because again, I’m doing quality control. And as I clicked on it, it would bump me out of the program again. And then it happened like 20 times.

I was so mad at my company. It was me. It was, of course I created, and this is my company. And I’m sitting here just dumbfounded. And I said, nobody told me what a bad user experience. This is really bad. So before the day was out, I contacted the company and I said, can you teach me how to make an app? I need an app like yesterday, already one click. I needed to be back where I left off in that program. So if you click on the resource and a bumps, you about one click you’re back where you right where you started. And so there was a company that said, yes, we can help you. And so I created this little app and then with the app, you get to decide, what else are you going to add onto that app? Okay. So we have a little bit about our course.

You can join. If you didn’t know about it, there’s a place where you can register for your free t-shirt of the day. There’s a place called new stuff where you can read our newsletter of the week. And our newsletter is like a wall of fame. Now highlights all of the members of our courses that have taken the courses that week. And I like that for the reason that we have lots of people that call me and they want to know who they can hire for house cleaning that have been through my courses. And so I say, well, here’s a list right now. You can just download the app and then every week check. And so we made it available on Android and iOS. So now in 175 countries, literally overnight, our app went live. And then all of a sudden, a bunch of people started joining our courses like 16, more people a day have been joining our courses since the app came out and I’m sitting here going well, that’s money in the bank.

Zivi:

So inspiring you, just so many things, right? And you started everything by choosing a very, very clear Micro niche. Did you ever come, uh, come up to you like the idea of back then pivoting into the online business, but doing it in a, not about the cleaning business. Did you ever consider something else?

Angela:

Well, yes and no. The riches are in the niches, as they say. And it’s really important to know what it is you offer, because if you don’t know what you offer, you can’t sell it and no one can buy it because who knows what they’re buying? Oh yeah. There’s this really nice guy. And you sell some stuff. And I think I’ll take a course from him. I’m not real sure what it’s about. You can’t recommend it, but if it’s narrow and you say, oh, it’s house housecleaning training people like, oh, house cleaning, training.

Well, my house cleaner needs that, or I need that because I would like to clean my house better. And then they recommend it to their friends. What is it? It’s house cleaning, training. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to recommend. And so did I ever think of doing something else? Yes. Every single day I get about 20 pitches from other places and other people, can we partner together? Will you sell my stuff? Will you market this? Would you like this business venture? And I have to be really clear about, is this part of the bigger package when I said yes to the t-shirt industry. It’s because I saw this as an opportunity house cleaners wear t-shirts okay. We clean houses wearing t-shirts. If there’s a funny cleaning saying, here’s how you can use this to market your business. When you’re standing in line at a grocery store and you’re wearing a funny cleaning shirt that says, beware of dishes, somebody is going to go, ha that’s so funny.

Angela:

Do you hate dishes? And they can say, I do. I’m a house cleaner. And I hate when I go into someone’s house and the kitchen is full of dishes, right? It starts a conversation. So there are natural conversation starters. And I saw that as a perfect segue into my business. So if they would have said, can we create something where we’re selling fancy dress shoes? That’s not in alignment with my business. And so every single day, you have to make sure that what you’re saying yes to is worthy of your time and your effort and your resources. And does it fit in with the existing audience that you have? Because if the answer is no, then pass on it, pass on it. You can always come back to it, but pass on it because you only have a limited amount of time, energy, and money, and you don’t want to spend any focus that does not exactly speak to that same audience.

And so every single thing we do, and we were a year and a half into the business, when the Airbnb industry just smacked us upside the head, like we were standing still, they’re like, we don’t do deep cleans. And we don’t do bi-weekly cleanings weekly and three and four times a week. When we flip our properties, what do you have for us? And I was like, and I realized we were perfectly positioned for something, but we didn’t have anything in place, but that was a perfect opportunity. Where can we pivot just a little bit, we can pivot. And what we’ll do is this. We will introduce every Wednesday, we will have an Airbnb show on our YouTube show and we will cater to that audience. And we’ll set up a private Facebook group for the Airbnb industry, because yes, it is cleaning. And we have a lot of regular house cleaners that also do Airbnb cleanings.

It wasn’t something completely different, but it was about the cleaning for the Airbnb space. And to say that we’re in a niche market every single day, I get asked janitorial and commercial cleaning questions. And every single day I turn them away. That is not our specialty. That is not what we do. I love you for trying it. Here’s my buddy. She’s been in the commercial industry for 30 years. Go say hi to him. Okay. That’s not who we are. And so you have to be willing to say, no, that’s how you stay in business.

Zivi:

And that’s how you go micro, Angela Brown from savvycleaner.com and funnlycleaningshirts.com. Did I say to clean.com? Oh man. Just, I highly recommend people go to savvycleaner.com, just check it out and realize the depth of what you do. And just, if you just reverse engineer and deconstruct and just be as productive as Angela Brown, you will also be noticed in your micro niche and we’ll be able to go business. Thank you so much for this inspiration moment and Angela and I hope you all the best.

Angela:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was awesome.

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.co, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting and daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

The post From a Cleaning Business to a Member Site Empire, with Angela Brown (MNM Season 1 Episode 4) appeared first on Daily Cookie.

Welcome to the third episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest today is Islam Benfifi, a copywriter for coaches and consultants known for his “Money Back Guarantee” offer.

Islam started as a copywriter in his agency which specializes in SEO and marketing.

Islam shared how he found a niche for business.

lslam talked about how he started his “Money Back guarantee” strategy.

Islam revealed his secrets in making “Money Back Guarantee” successful.

Islam mentioned how a random trivia and news helped him in writing copies.

Islam explained the techniques in making a pitch to clients.

Islam shared why being paid by commissions is not a good idea.

Islam narrated his experiences in finding his customers in LinkedIn and different groups.

Islam how he deals with “jealous” people

Islam’s silly posts that used song lyrics made him earn $20,000.

The secrets in choosing customers and money back guarantee are revealed. Listen to know more. 

facebook.com/ibenfifi

dailycookie.co

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Welcome to the micro niche mastery podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, when one of his businesses stopped growing, he fixed it by niching down to solve a problem that only affected 5% of his email list. Ziv, Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello, today’s interviewee is Islam Benfifi and Islam is, uh, has this, uh, claim that is amazingly sexy. And that is if he’s the most expensive copywriter in Russia. I don’t know if that’s true or not, because I didn’t check, but definitely peaked my curiosity, but what peaks my curiosity for even more than that is that Islam has a unique selling proposition. He is unique in his offer in his money back guarantee, and that is something that everyone can learn from. So I want to welcome you to the show. Hello Islam.

Islam:

How are you?

Ziv:

 Good. Good. Thank you for taking the time to come here and chat with us just a little bit about what you do. I want to start just by understanding because you chose to serve very specific people. You’re not just unique in the way that you present your offer and your money back guarantee.

You’re also unique in choosing qualifying, who you work with. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey into copywriting first?

Islam:

Sure. So first thank you for having me on the podcast. I started my journey as a copywriter, probably 2008, somewhere around 2008, 2007. So, uh, I used to do SEO before that I used to have a marketing agency SEO services, and because I sucked managing team just wasn’t for me operation. So I decided why not sound sexy? And everyone had in beards and shaggy in Thailand. So, uh, yeah, I started doing copywriter and I was following a few people rather in a few books and I stumbled upon the Ross Rafino, which I was following before. It was, uh, an affiliate marketer. And I found that his selling his offer to the high ticket, basically coaches and is just selling a webinar basically is selling on webinar funnel as a course, as a coaching program.

Islam:

It was an interesting idea. So I said is selling a, my angle via that I would sell the copy for the webinar, right? If there’s a niche for such a thing, I found a niche. So why not write the copy for it once a well for awhile. But then I stumbled on daily emails from Dave D and for some reason, whenever I mentioned people that for people, nobody seems to know him about the work at J K IC with Dan Kennedy. So is that kind of a big deal in the model? But yeah, when, uh, he started, uh, I subscribed to him, started emailing me daily. I noticed that he was the only person basically that I was eager to open emails and they were mixing kind of sometimes silly. Sometimes [inaudible] sometimes educated sometimes all of it at once, whatever it was. I was excited to open the emails that even if I didn’t open the email today or next day or three days, I always came back to, right.

So then it hit me that maybe this is a good idea. And I noticed that he said in a course about the email, right? So that’s where I started doing daily emails, setting daily. And as for the guarantee, the guarantee, I took it from a course from franker, it was a client acquisition. And in it, he said he teaches something called the irresistible intrigue offer. And in his irresistible intrigue offer, he’s talking that is for example, coaching or anything, really. He talks about giving an offer that if you don’t like it, I’ll send you $100 or $500. Right. And as a teacher, as long as you’re good in filtering and setting the conditions upfront, you will never have to pay anybody 100 and $500, but you get the benefits of, Hey, he has something in dream as a guarantee. So yeah, I started playing it from there.

I was, I was not really sure what I was doing, but I started with $100, then $500 guarantee that $1,000 guarantee 5,000. And then I ended up at the house

Ziv:

 Just to clarify, basically you’re telling your clients in a very ballsy way that if they’re not happy for any reason, from the service, not only will you refund the money, but you will also pay them $10,000. You’ll wire it to paper.

Islam:

And not, if they’re not happy with, I set the specific claim that I don’t increase their sales. Right. And the, yeah, the guarantee, when you read it, increase your sales, I will pay you $10,000. It sounds outrageous a bit. Right. But when you think about it, I pick only people with a good list who have a good offer, a high ticket offer. And I only push the needle a bit with daily emails.

So they have the offer, they have the relationship, they have the list, they have everything. What they need is to pitch more. And most people are afraid to do that, especially with the emails. So what I say to them is give me your list. I’ll talk to it more often. Right. And yeah, as a, if the, the criteria, uh, the sales just happen,

Ziv:

So you make it sound simple, but you’re actually selling like an entry level, like to start a relationship type of offer with 15 emails that will be emailed if I understand correctly all within one month, is that correct?

Islam:

Yeah. 15 emails. I recommend it’s daily or once every two days. So, yeah. Yeah.

Ziv:

So tell me what happens in those emails.

Islam:

What happens in those emails is basically more or less the same. So I start with a story or something random.

I had dinner today. I had pasta today and I craft a story from there and it needs to, of course, to be authentic with what the client does. So if he’s in China and never ate best, I can say it’s best. And, uh, yeah, I can pick a random trivia. I can pick a piece of news and talk about it, talk about the weather, anything really. And the try to link that starts with something that sounds like social media, social media. So, so clean can read. So I was, uh, starting like that and then try to link it to the, the actual offer with a soft pitch at the end. Right. So I tried to really think it’s, for example, if she’s selling weight loss, try to link eating pasta to healthy eating, right. And the, by the way, if you want healthy eating, check out my program at the end of the email, most of the day, the email sellers do the same thing.

Because as I understand it, all of us learned it from the same person, but, uh, yeah, they, they learn this. I learned it from the people no more of Ben settle. Ben settle also learned it from if I remember correctly. So yeah, sometimes the testimonials emails, sometimes I get their webinars, for example, and I slice that women are into ideas and each idea I speak as a topic for the email and they all follow the same, that the email is very short light and gets to the point of they’re fairly quick.

Ziv:

So, uh, what happens with the client after the first month they’ve basically purchased the trip wire form. You, they were willing to take the risk with you because they there’s an amazing money back guarantee. So they can clues really either make more money or they make money from you. They, we need the weight, right. First. Did it ever happen to you that someone clear?

Islam:

Nope. I was a fairly rigorous with, with that. So it doesn’t have to grow because, uh, people, actually, people don’t when they get on people don’t really care about the guarantee. The guarantee is, uh, the people who take it as a challenge to prove me wrong, never have become clients, right. Because either they don’t like it, or they when they tried to get in, just to prove me wrong, I feel that there’s something wrong with their approach. And I turned them down. I don’t get a, they don’t work with everyone, but two people who I think are a mean and business light about it, they just found the guarantee as a way to get their trust and their now trust me a bit and also give me their money. So yeah, we work on it. I never had the problem.

Ziv:

And what happens after the first, like 15 emails? What is your continuity of it? After that?

Islam:

Most people I never hear from, she’s fine. That’s the point. But the few people who really like what I did, I pitch them on my retainer. Right. And my retainer starts at 10,000 emails, but $10,000 month. Right. It’s a that’s for daily emails only. Right. And if they want to a deeper partnership, we can discuss more pricing after.

Ziv:

Do you actually pitch that to the client? Only if they ask you,

Islam:

 I follow up with them. Hey, uh, and if they say awesome, cool, excellent. Sometimes I don’t, even, sometimes they write to me after each email, they say, whoa, amazing. Because they don’t know the power of their list. Right. I have many clients that I gave them. For example, I asked them the emails that they send before, and they’re dry as a stone, right.

So it’s a corporate, Hey, we have this offer today for you, 25% discount, please click here. So, uh, yeah, when they give them something a bit organic, a bit with a soul in it, the list reacts, right. And when you, even if it didn’t react on the first day, the second day at 1230 in a week, it is bound to happen. And, uh, a lot of people get excited with it for a lot of people have hugely with a great offer, but they don’t know how to take advantage of it. So what if a guy with a, let’s say, 80,000 emails selling an offer for $5,000, it can do a lot of profits can bring a lot of money. And, uh, people understand that decide to work with me.

Ziv:

What is your position on serving clients as a copywriter where you will get paid through commissions, basically a royalty or commission?

Islam:

Yeah. I accept that on the condition that there’s also a fixed fee besides the commission. Right? So I don’t work on commission. I tried to do it once or twice to experiment and it never works. People just take the emails, go away. They don’t pay. Right. So it’s not a good filter.

Ziv:

What are the criteria for you to accept the client for your initial one month offer basically?

Islam:

 To sell a offer that is $1,000 plus, and have an email that is 1000 plus emails in their list and on the condition that the list is not bought. So it was actually built via organic or pictures or referrals or whatever. Just not.

Ziv:

What about if it was guided through Facebook paid marketing? Would you still accept that?

 Islam:

Yeah, sure. A lot of people do.

Ziv:

Did you have a experience where you felt like the email itself is not really responding, even though it’s bigger than a thousand and the offer is of a thousand, but you just don’t see good open rates coming up from the emails, from the email list.

Islam:

I actually don’t worry about that stuff because as I said, the criteria out of there for me, it’s probably something about the offer or the list, not about me. And it’s probably something that’s bad that went with them from the start, because my guarantee is the compare, the results of this month or this period with the period right before. So if there’s something that’s really sucks, it will still suck, but it will still suck less with, with a daily. Yeah.

Ziv:

What about, is there a minimum, like they, they’re not making a lot of money, so they have a thousand emails. They have a thousand dollars offer, but then they didn’t sell anything last last month or just a bit. Would you still take the accounts?

Islam:

Yeah, I think a lot of people, but a lot of people that call them that they’re not fit for the guarantee.

If your list is brand new, you build it. But it’s brand new. We can’t compare to a zero. Right. I fell on that. There most people are fine with it because the people with brand new who approached me, I’m not looking for the gap. And, uh, I take people who are, uh, have offers that are lower, for example, $500. If I see that the list is big enough and I tell them it doesn’t fit the guarantee for example.

Ziv:

And so how do you find customers? Because you can’t really tell from the outside of a business, if they have an email list that is over 1000,

Islam:

Honestly, I just think, yeah, I never had a problem with that. So I just trust them when they say, and I use it, you just write the emails, they use them. If they had a problem, they asked for a guarantee, then we can go through all the claims, show me the list show. Right.

Ziv:

And then what do you do that to get customers to that wants to work with you?

Islam:

I just honestly, uh, for the two years for now, I just posted in a single group, copy job board. I did stuff here and there. I posted on LinkedIn. I did the, in other groups where they, for example, they have a Friday or something like that. So pitch us your offer in the comments I did that. I pitch open on my personal profile, but yeah, I just keep it light.

Ziv:

Some people, uh, that’s noticed your offer, maybe got jealous in the Facebook group. And by the way, we’ll put that in the show notes, all the links to all of the resources that you’ve mentioned today. But how do you feel about that? Like that people are upset about your bowl, the money back guarantee.

Islam:

I know a lot of people were upset, money guarantee box.

I just laugh it off. A lot of people have blocked me. I was so offended. Funny enough. Most of the people offended by this are copywriters themselves. How dare you remember when I wrote the first post and the job board and the, at the time, all the posts that the job or needed to be so wordy. I just wrote at the time, um, right. I don’t remember how many emails for a 5,000 guarantee. That’s it. It’s single sentence. And people were really upset. Send me messages. What the heck are you doing? Go learn copywriting first.

So how this is not the copy, but the, I just treated the job, this thing, right? So why not just post the nitty gritty of it? Just here’s the offer I did. Of course longer. I did the frequently asked questions. I did testimonials played with it. I did humor. Funny enough, you did the very silly posts on the job board at the time that landed me $20,000. It was, I listened to this song. It’s called Gil bananas by little big. And it’s just surreal. Ridiculous. The video clip doesn’t make sense. The lyrics doesn’t make sense. I just posted a part of the lyrics, the same way I do for emails. [inaudible],

Islam:

I’m buying I’m [inaudible]. And, uh, I went from there and linked it to, if you’re wanting to go bananas with emails, something like that, here’s a peanut sending me a message. Uh, people, uh, got a laugh of it. Yeah. And, uh, some reach to me. One of them said, Hey, I’ll take your offer. And it ended up with a 20,000.

Ziv:

 Islam. If people want to learn more about what you do or even contact you for help with the copy, with their businesses, with their Emily’s welcome. There you go.

Islam:

I’m only active on Facebook sometimes on maintenance type Islam Benfifi. Find me on Facebook, just send the Frederick.

Ziv:

And we will, I’ll put the link for that as well in the show notes. And I want to say, just thank you for being open here and chatting. What do you do? And what are the results you’re getting by choosing to not just be a copywriter or a daily copywriter, but to focus on specific type of customers and specific type of money back guarantee you have created for yourself, a micro niche, and clearly you have mastered your nation and managed to thrive. And the girl, even in conditions that are hostile and yet you’ve managed to, we may, again and again, I want to thank you for being here in the show. And I guys check out the show notes because all these amazing resources that Islam is a shared, you want check them out valuable. So thank you again, Islam.

Islam:

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.co, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting and daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

The post Killer Money Back Guarantee by Most Expensive Copywriter in Russia, with Islam Benfifi (MNM Season 1 Episode 3) appeared first on Daily Cookie.

Welcome to the second episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our guest is today is Chris Badgett, Founder and CEO at LifterLMS.

 lifterlms.com

dailycookie.co

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Ziv:

Hello. Welcome to the micro-niche mastery podcast. I’m so excited to have here with me, the CEO and founder of lifter LMS, they have such an amazing time using lifter LMS in multiple Michael niches businesses. It makes six figures that it was just obvious that they want to have Chris here on the show. He’s quite a smart cookie. Have a great fun. Enjoy the interview and hello to you. Please. High case is ever scared to be here. Well, I want to say thank you, Chris, for taking the time. I know you’re a busy man. You’ll help a lot of people with the online schools and businesses, but you actually started as an instructor and a teacher yourself. Can you tell me a little bit about your story? 

Chris:

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess my first micro niche as an online education guy was in a niche within organic gardening called permaculture.

Chris:

And I started partnering with experts to create the content. And basically that was my first course project. I started blogging about what I was doing and how I built the WordPress site to have an online business. And that was the beginning of what later became lifter LMS. So I’ve always just been around niche marketing and niche markets. And clearly you have to go micro to, like, I see the pattern micro niches when no niche definitely doesn’t win. And then like too broad is like really hard near impossible. Well, why is it so hard these days for those people that choose a niche that is just too big? Well, the first, I mean, this is a question that I literally obsess over. So, um, but one of the things that’s, I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the word expert versus the word coach expert kind of implies like I’m an expert at something, but coach really is about the player and about helping this other person.

Chris:

And who, when you think about coaching, you literally have to choose who you’re going to help when you’re just an expert. It’s more inward focus. So I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been playing with in my mind lately that I think coaches like yourself are more successful just because your coaches, as opposed to just trying to monetize your expertise, if you will. I love, and this is not the first time I hear you talk about how the focus of a business of a Costco is about the transformation. Can you talk about that please? Yeah. So the best courses, the most successful coaches, they help a client transform some aspect of themselves or their life or their situation. The course is really just a mechanism and the expertise or the content is really just part of that mechanism to deliver this result. Ideally, a transformational result that has a lot of value to the person, but yeah, that’s what it’s all about.

Chris:

We get really wrapped up in our own internal talk with ourselves or our expertise, but that transformation is really, if that doesn’t happen, we don’t really have a business because people are not going to buy or refer or stay on a subscription. If there’s not this ongoing transformational value coming out of the training program, you meet a lot, uh, your clients, you have, uh, like, uh, these meetings that you conduct. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s going on there and what’s your goal with that? So I offer something called office hours mastermind. I think that’s what you’re talking about and that’s, I have a belief that whoever’s closest to the customer wins. And all that is to say is that that’s why there’s a phone number on our website. That’s why I do all these live webinars for sales. So I can answer people’s questions.

Chris:

That’s why I support my customers in a group coaching mastermind call. If we don’t get close to them, how can we ever understand them? And how can we also, we need to constantly challenge our assumptions because as experts in, whatever it is, sometimes you’re wrong or you’re overvaluing a certain aspect or something. And I mean, I that’s, one of the things I admire about you is if I see you get close to your customers and you’re helping them navigate, and as the world changes you change with them together. I like to say that I optimize for conversations more than conversions. I think investing in communication with people, whether you’re in a pre-sales environment or you’re supporting them as a customer, this is where a lot of the value is created. And it’s not so hard to create great courses or other resources for your people when you have a direct line of communication with them.

Chris:

So you’re you have that feedback loop open, having feedback loop open is super important to creating a product that stands the test of time. Well, you actually stay close that way to your customers and you also help them on a very personal level within those calls, listening to the problems and trying to support them, but, and also create relationships with other players in the ecosystem. Why is that important for you iron sharpens iron? So like I, I’m in, I’m kind of a mastermind junkie. Like I have all these like groups of like WordPress product companies. I go hang out with, I have some other groups have like software, not necessarily WordPress specific entrepreneurs. I hang out with. I have other like information product people I hang out with or affiliate marketers that I hang out with. I mean, even in I’ve even taken my, my number one competition in WordPress, we’ve gone out to dinner together.

Chris:

So when you’re in an industry, there’s basically three relationships. There’s the relationship with your market. There’s a relationship with your industry. And then there’s a relationship you have with yourself around like your, your own limiting beliefs or ability to goal set and create a vision and things like that. So if you’re missing any one of those is not very healthy or you’re just under optimized in my experience. So I’m always trying to work on all three of those. And also of course, outside of that, like for your family relationships and friendships and stuff like that, but in the business context, your market, your industry peers, and then yourself as an entrepreneur, you have a very interesting take on how to use YouTube, like in a, like a minimal viable way of just going into YouTube and doing certain things that are needed for basically any online course creator or maybe even any, uh, Michael business.

Ziv:

Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Chris:

YouTube is probably my favorite type of marketing or just video marketing in general, but I mean, I’m here because of YouTube. I started my first, like online course was about how to build a WordPress website and it was right around the, I was doing the gardening stuff and then I started blogging doing stuff around WordPress, and I just recorded myself over the course of a weekend, building a WordPress website from scratch, turned that into an online course on you, Demi, but also put all the training for free on YouTube. And then all of a sudden my phone started ringing and clients wanting to hire me to build the website. So it was there that I learned to be very generous with my knowledge, just teach what you know, and then that reaction that some of the market, a small percentage of the market will be like, Hey, can I just hire you to do that?

Chris:

Or can I buy your thing? That’s like more curated and better or whatever, but I’m a huge YouTube guy also because my products, it’s not cheap, but it’s not super expensive. So at the, like some softwares, sometimes I’m hanging out with these enterprise software people with these huge, like these customers paying tens of thousands of dollars a year and whatnot. But when you’re working with a market that doesn’t have huge budget or just needs to be efficient with their software budget, you got to automate stuff. So one of the things to do YouTube is the best way to automate yourself. So just to give you an example, like right now, I’m in the process of just recording a bunch of FAQ videos that are just the sales FAQ’s that people off the questions people often ask for, they buy just putting all those on YouTube just to kind of automate myself.

Chris:

But yeah, YouTube is huge. And the thing about YouTube is thinking full funnel so that you can create, I create stuff about WordPress, which is my industry. I create stuff around just course creators in general. And then as you get closer to the buying decision, there’s different types of content for different parts of the funnel. And then what I’m a big believer in is full stack. So that means as much effort as we put into sales, we’re going to put them to support. So that’s why I hired a customer success manager lately, and he’s been creating a lot of more success or getting started content on YouTube. So it’s huge, but it automates people. You talk about how does different levels of awareness of our clients and how at the very least like you, you can have a video for the different awareness levels. Do you mind, uh, expanding about that?

Chris:

Yeah. So the buyer’s journey like starts with unaware. So, and I’ll explain what these are, but just to lay out the map, it’s unaware, problem, aware, solution aware, and then product aware, and then they buy so unaware content people hire, let me back up and say, people hire businesses to solve problems in order to solve a problem. You have to be aware that you have a problem, but before you’re aware that you have a problem, you might be in an unaware stage. So just to use like a really general example, I’ll just make it up off the top of my head. If I’m trying to sell the software as an example of creating courses and membership sites, somebody who doesn’t even aware that they need it, want to figure out a way to teach online what might also be happening in their life. They could be in a job that they hate.

Chris:

They could feel like they’re not fulfilling their potential. They could feel like they’re not leaving a legacy that maybe they’re concerned about retirement. That’s like unaware content that I can make problem aware is like, okay, well, I need to figure out how to turn all this passion and energy for my solution for this micro niche into educational product. Okay. Now I’m kind of, I need to figure out how to do that. So I have a problem. So then I might go make some content about when you should use teachable or maybe use a WordPress based solution, or what should you consider? What are all these different words mean? Like membership site or drip content or courses and so on. And then when we get down to the solution where Y is lifted the best, that solution, where like I’m aware of the suite of, but let’s talk about lifters specifically.

Chris:

So that’s kind of like the full buyer’s journey. And at any one point in time, I’ve heard statistics like maybe 5% of the market, your micro-niche that you’re talking to is actually ready to buy right now. That’s why it’s really important to have that full funnel and a lot of the great stuff you do at daily cookie about keeping them a market, adding value through email and stuff like that, because everybody’s not ready to buy constantly all the time. And we forget that, especially as a business owner, because we’re like, I need sales, I gotta make money. And you know, people should just buy my stuff. Totally. A lot of, as a coach, I see this all the time where the marketing copy of so many businesses are only talking to the most aware level of awareness where, uh, like basically the business owner expects everyone to totally understand that they have a huge problem that the best solution in the world is theirs.

Chris:

And all they need to do is kinda like talk about making a decision now by expanding your horizons of your marketing and your content on YouTube, to a piece about the different solutions wise, to raise awareness to your specific solution, through talking about all the options and the piece about making sure that you actually have a problem you allow. And of course, a piece about why your solution is the best, like when they’re already warm and like showing them inside of your solution, how it looks like those pieces of content that like, uh, at the very least, either a compass of where to create at, or have at least one for each or even a lead magnet for each a PDF, an ebook or whatever. 

Ziv:

I want to ask you a question, what comes first? What should come first coaching or online courses? That’s a good one.

Chris:

I mean, if I could, people can do it different ways. I’ve seen both work, but if I was to advise somebody to get them to have the highest odds of success, I would do the coaching first. I would recommend that. So that it basically what it does based on what were talking about earlier is it gets that feedback loop open right away so that we’re working with somebody directly instead of through a product. And we quickly find out, maybe we have several clients, not all of them are the same. Maybe they’re all getting hung up on this one thing. Maybe we need to focus here. I would definitely recommend starting that way. If you can. The problem with online business is that people try to scale and automate too early. And I understand why, like you want to have an infinitely, scalable, passive income product or whatever, but the best products you can almost taste it like a direct feedback loop is just part of the product.

Chris:

And maybe you can aspire to one day to step out of your business and have built like an incredible library of amazing stuff that you’ve co-created with your people. But, uh, it’s a co-creative act. So coaching first, if I had to pick, if you must do an online course, first, I would do something called a mini course, which would be maybe around 10 lessons or something that may perhaps around the $200 price point. That’s not too ambitious. So the, I see a lot of people go in to make some, a course, and then they get stuck months if not years, sometimes. So yeah, I love it because once you make it short term, you will have a shorter loop where you will see whether the course walks or not in a speedy way. And I think that the main problem of locating this blueprint course where it’s like five models with 50 lessons each and like just hours of, of a course is that you don’t know if the cost walks and it takes sometimes a whole year for someone to go through it.

Chris:

And if they give you feedback and then you need to fix it, you’re just going to, you’re going into a timeframe of getting it right in three to four to five years, where if you are a bad coach, you will lose your business so fast. People will not recommend you, right? If you, if you’re a good coach and you give people results in a matter of of 12 weeks, then you learn so much from doing that and what to teach other people basically. Yeah. And one quick thing I’m seeing worldly working for people these days is if you think about a course, each course solves like one problem. When you try to pack all your expertise into one course, it just becomes a manageable. But if you have like a more of a collection of courses that are each one has a specific job to do, it becomes easier to create.

Chris:

And also easier on the learner to pick the one that they need to take right now, and also clearly understand what they get out of it and stay motivated because it’s has a specific goal. What’s the, the best, uh, strategy for lift LMS as a SAS software, as a service company to grow marketing wise, to grow like what’s our marketing strategy for growth. What’s the number one thing that works for you. For me, it’s content marketing, organic, not paid marketing. I would do I’ve experimented with paid, but, and I get ROI results. If you have a really good micro niche, I might do more paid because it’s easier to target. Like it’s, I’ll come back to that. But at the end of the day, I really see three growth strategies, organic or inbound marketing and creating content, whether that’s YouTube videos, podcasts, blog, posts, outbound, where you’re doing cold email, cold outreach.

Chris:

And then the third one is like relationships. So like strategic partnerships and all that stuff. So I actually do a combination of all that. However, the organic and what I find with most businesses is everybody has a superpower with us. The content is our main driver of growth. And for me, I’m a big video guy. So I like to do video sometimes it’s podcast content like an interview. Sometimes it’s, uh, something about the software. Sometimes I’m just making content around a specific problem. But yeah, so organic marketing is that for us. And I mean, I just try to make as much of it as possible. And I keep investing in ways to make it better, not so much from like a video quality standpoint. I do like that stuff and try to get it better over time, but more like, how can I make content?

Chris:

That’s the most useful at one tip for micro niche people out there is just because you don’t have a ton of views. If you’re well positioned in the right market, it doesn’t matter. Like I have plenty of videos that have like a hundred views or 150 or 60 views, but another people that are watching that are who I want to see it. So if you see a YouTuber with big view counts and you’re getting small views, it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. Yeah. Especially on the, in the micro niches, like I’ve been able to be successful in micro-niche is at a 3000 worldwide professional site or 6,000 in these type of situations. The view count doesn’t matter at all. Because as long as those, the people that are watching it are the right people. Then those are 100% people that will be interested in you.

Ziv:

And you will raise that awareness of what you do. I have a question about your competitors. Why, why should people prefer having the lifter LMS the learning management system, the solution for managing the online courses and the lessons and the students, and maybe the certificates, maybe the tests, the quizzes, maybe like just the entire thing. Why not choose a platform like a one platform to hold them all like Kajabi or, or a hybrid platform that has some of the solutions of what you need, like thinki phaco or whatever. I’ll go. High-level why, why should they go to a WordPress website and put the lifter LMS plug-in on it? 

Chris:

I think it’s important for one, just from an ownership standpoint, too, if you’re going to create a business asset to really have to own it and not have a, um, like you’re, you’re basically renting space on somebody else’s server when you go with a hosted platform.

Chris:

But when you install WordPress and put on your site is your website. Your, you have access to the files and everything it’s yours. So you can take a copy of it and all this stuff it’s its own. The other thing is the WordPress ecosystem is very powerful from a there’s a lot of off the shelf tools you can use. There’s a whole network of people that you can hire. If you want somebody to do it for you or build custom functionality for you. So that’s the power of having like 40% of the internet powered by WordPress and all the people that make products for the space, as opposed to one company with a team, making a software, it’s not to be underestimated the amount of options and share power and creativity that is in WordPress. And then the final one that I see a lot of people choose WordPress for is the design to have like a unique brand.

Chris:

Like if you want cookie cutter, like every, like I can tell when I’m on a teachable site, teachable is great, but I can tell, I can tell him I’m on. I think if excited, they all look the same. Maybe they swap out the colors and the logo, but that ability to kind of let you adapt the website to your needs instead of you to, it is like a big thing for people from a design perspective. And then from once you get inside and you choose WordPress, what makes us stand out is our level of support are all in oneness. Doesn’t mean we do everything under the sun, but most of what you need is in house with lifter. And we just have a great community. And because I spent a lot of time and the team as well, like interacting with people like we know what people want.

Ziv:

So like we’re not just inventing what we want to invent, we’re going with the market. So those are some, uh, things that make lifter great. I have been experimenting by myself, uh, with our brands in, in WordPress with different platforms. And we’ve decided eventually to go with lifter LMS as our leading platform and the one that we recommend to our coaching clients. But let me tell you why here on, on live on this show, first of all, I think the topic of the visibility of your costs is actually crucial in these days when mobile is not just first mobile is king and queen. And if you’re not really friendly and looking great on the end or like loads fast and everything, then you’re just losing a huge opportunity. And I’ve seen all these other builders that, that just are not as customizable for mobile is basically worthless.

ziv:

So being native on world-class for even just that, that, uh, reason is a huge bonus. Of course, it’s super flexible to be on WordPress. Anyway, I’ve seen two main reasons that made me just want to like each time, uh, did I need to make a pick, we’ll go back and pick lifterlms. The first one is like you said, the support, and this is something that is super critical. People don’t understand. It’s way better to pay for expensive hosting and for good solutions. If you know that when you need them, they will be there and they will support you and do above and beyond of what they need. And that’s how I perceive your team, Chris, because when I asked them a question, they will like find a CSS that walks, they will like really hold my hand until this is done and fixed and relatively very, very fast to the second reason why I choose lifter LMS is that there are bugs sometimes in any piece of software, I’ve been seeing that personally, but the embarrassing bags, the backstairs are really fascinating.

ziv:

Like you can’t make a lesson mark this complete, or you can’t move things around or something like that. I never experienced any of these bugs. I would live there. So quality plus support equals love. I love you. I love the fact that you can hear to the show and if someone wants to check out lifting a mess, Chris, what should they do? So they can just go to lifter, lms.com. The core lifter LMS plug-in is actually completely free. So you just throw that up on your website and try it out. We also have on our, on our website, if you want a temporary website with all our technology and demo content installed, and you just kind of want to play around with it before you make a decision, we’d call that a 30 day demo. So sweet guys. Thank you so much for listening, Chris. Thank you for being here and see you next week in niche mustard report. Thank you.

Ziv:

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.co, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie.co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting, a daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

The post Adding Online Courses to your Micro niches Starts HERE with Chris Badgett (MNM Season 1 Episode 2) appeared first on Daily Cookie.

Welcome to the very first season and episode of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.  

Our first guest is Matt Giovanisci, a serial entrepreneur with a ton of knowledge on SEO and… swimming pools. He founded Swim University, co-founded a personal finance brand and podcast called Listen Money Matters, and started a coffee education site called Roasty (which he has since sold). In 2016 he created Money Lab so he could build more brands, make more money, and write off his homebrewing hobby.

moneylab.co

dailycookie.co

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode

Hello, and today’s guest is Matt [inaudible]. He is a serial entrepreneur, an online business owner, all the way for money lab.co. And hello, Matt, how are you? Oh, man, I really appreciate you coming into this show. I’ve seen you build a smart, elaborate, you know, other more specific businesses. And I wanted to have you here to kind of talk about what would you see as a micro niche and like tips to operating it. So let’s start in the beginning. What was your first micro-niche you went into,

Matt (00:38):

It was swimming pools you know, mainly like pool and hot tub care. And that was because I had just been doing that for a living, you know, I was just working at a store. So it wasn’t like I went out and tried to find, you know, an, a need that that was micro or that was like, oh, I’m going to dominate in this niche because no one else is in it. I just was, I was already in it. It was just what I did. I’ve been in several other ones since then, but it’s, but that was the first, that was the first

Ziv  (01:07):

One. So it was more like a passion for content marketing as a way to grow, like to, to succeed in your current. Nischal what

Matt (01:18):

I wouldn’t call it a passion so much as like, I, I had a desire to be my own boss. That was the first kind of like, I’ve always been entrepreneurial in that sense where I would just start up little businesses here and there, you know, just as a kid or whatever. And there was a, there was a point in my career where I was working at this pool store for a long time. And, you know, I’ve been in the pool industry since I was 13. So I’ve just been doing it for so long. And I got to this point where this, this guy wanted to buy a store and then stick me in there as like the, the, the person who runs the store. I ended up not going through with that, but it was like, I’ve, I knew that at some point in doing what I was doing, I want it to just be in control. I want it to be my own boss, because I just didn’t like working for other people. Like, I’ve just always just had some sort of like issue with authority or whatever. So

What did you know that you, like, what was the original plan when you went into being your own boss? Then

Matt (02:28):

The original plan was just to take what we were, what I was teaching at the pool store to customers. And I knew very little about, you know, I knew how to design a website. That’s that’s as far as I really, I knew how to do it. Cause I was working on website design while I was working at, in the pool industry as well. And so I knew that I wanted to kind of somewhere like do something in that realm, but I didn’t know how it was going to make money. The only two things I really knew where I could sell advertising know if I get enough traffic and I could recommend products via affiliate marketing before, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t use Amazon in the beginning, but I knew like that’s how I made money at the pool store was I would, somebody would come in with a problem.

Matt (03:13):

I would help them solve their problem. And then I would, you know, go, Hey, buy this chemical, this is going to help you or buy this. And I would literally just be recommending products that we sold in our store. But I didn’t want to get into e-commerce that wasn’t, that wasn’t appealing to me. I, because I knew there was a lot of like work in the shipping and packaging and all that stuff. And I just didn’t want to be a part of that and then there’s drop shipping, but that gets more complicated when you start to add chemicals into the mix and it’s not as, you know, easy to do. So for me, it was like kind of, I knew it was going to be in the pool space and I knew I was going to help customers just take care of their pools and hot tubs money-wise it was like, you know, ad sense was big at the time. So it was like, okay, add census where I can start and affiliate marketing really.

Ziv  (04:04):

And how long do you take to actually see some, some results that made you go like, whoa?

Matt (04:09):

No. Yeah. I mean it probably longer than it should have taken me. I think I was a little bit wishy-washy on the whole, you know, I think that was a time in my life where I wasn’t very productive, you know, I was cause I was working a normal job and I would then I would come home and work on the computer a little bit, you know, mostly working on like I was working on a website for my band and that was like taking up all of my time. And so this is like a third thing that I was working on and I wasn’t, I was a little lazier in my youth than I am today. So, you know, I, I would say it probably took about a year or two to see like a hundred bucks a month from AdSense and go like, and I just, but I, I knew it was like, I may not have worked on it intently, but I kept telling myself that this is, this was going to be my career path. Like I knew, I knew I was going in that direction. I just, it just took me a long time to sort of fully dedicate myself to it.

Ziv  (05:18):

So what would, what was your second jump where you you’re doing $100 a month and what did he do to really scale it up?

Matt (05:29):

Well, I try to do a bunch of different things. Like I had that website and it did. Okay. You know, it’s just like, it was like extra money, but nothing that would be livable on or, or any of that, the first time I saw a livable wage from it was actually when I had already been laid off from my job. So this was, you know, probably seven or eight years into maybe, maybe I’ll say years into actually working on it and having in birthing it. From, I saw, I technically launched it in 2004. I bought the domain in 2004. I really launched it, you know, had a, actually had a website in 2006 and then I got laid off in 2011. And it wasn’t until that year where I started seeing a $40,000 a year income, which was, you know, I’m like, okay, that’s what I was making at the store.

Matt (06:25):

So I could, you know, move over to that. But yeah, that, that, that was the jump, but it took, if anything, I would say it was, I don’t, I don’t re you know, it’s hard to say what really pushed it, but I was, I did sort of rededicate myself to I had this sort of change in my, in my process, which was, I was just trying to, you know, in the beginning I was just trying to write articles to rank, you know, and try to make money on affiliate marketing. And I, and the articles were garbage and were terrible articles. And there was a point where I was like, and I think it was, I, you know, I found Corbett BARR a fizzle, and he was kind of saying like, you know, instead of trying to write for the robots, you should just write helpful stuff.

Matt (07:10):

Like just write really good stuff. And I was like, okay, well, I wasn’t really a writer, but I was like, all right, I can get on board with this idea of I’m going to really try to make an article that is not just like appeasing the Google bots, but also like trying to, to really like help somebody. And I know that sounds insane to say like seven years into it, but that’s when you, I think I was led down a path of like, here’s how to win the internet. You just have to put words on the page. And it doesn’t like, I didn’t really think about the end consumer. I was really just thinking about my bottom line, which wasn’t growing. And until I switched to that sort of like, oh, I’m actually going to make helpful videos and helpful infographics and helpful articles that are, you know, in depth as much as they need to be while still being a very terrible writer, but, you know, but it w but when I saw, I started to see traffic grow and then obviously income just sort of grows from that because with affiliate market, as long as you have affiliate links on the page, and as long as you have ad sense on the page, like things are just going to move up, you know, they’re just going to increase as traffic increases.

Ziv  (08:18):

So it sounds like if you had to give yourself like this one lesson back, if you could like go back in time and talk with Matt, that is still a working guy,

Matt (08:32):

I built a time machine to do exactly that.

Ziv  (08:34):

What, what would you tell a little story?

Matt (08:37):

So there is an article on money lab where I pretend to build a time machine and go back because yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this. It would be that like, it would be giving that advice that I got from Corbett much earlier. So back in, I would take that advice that I maybe in 2011, 2012, and go back into 2006 and be like, look, the way that you win this. I don’t worry about the money right now because it’s, that’s what I was worried about in the beginning was like, I have to make money as fast as humanly possible. And so I’m basically selling my soul to the devil to make money, which is why, which is like spinning articles and creating this crappy pieces of content. And I would have told myself like, this is how these guys are doing it, and you’re gonna, like, you’re gonna follow these guys, but these guys are going to be wrong in the next, you know, four years.

Matt (09:29):

You know, the way that you win the internet is Google’s going to become a person that can look at your articles and go, is this good or not? Yes or no, as a human being. And not just as a robot, like counting how many keywords are on a page. And so I would have told myself, like invest in, you know, basically building what I consider to be the textbook for pool care. You know, you know, think about everything from a a perspective of, you know, this is you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re writing the manual for these people and they need that. And if I, and you know, when I started and started and starting doing videos much earlier to would have been huge for me, but that’s what I would go back and kind of say, like, don’t focus, focus on traffic, but in the sense of like, you know, somebody should read this and then want to send it to their friend who also owns a pool who is having a similar issue go, this is the article.

Ziv  (10:30):

Yeah. I remember, I used to think about if only I would know about backlinks earlier, right. And then if only I would have started with podcasting earlier,

Matt (10:42):

You know what though? That I didn’t, that was the, one of the, this is why I kind of run on the train of like backlinks are because I cert because that’s the first train I was on, that was who I was learning from, was people who are just like, it doesn’t the content doesn’t matter. What matters is how many backlinks you can get to that content. You will win if that’s what you do, if that’s where your focus is. So I used to have spreadsheets of in my day job or my, my, my, my side job, I guess, in this case is not writing the article. It was like, you know, just crapping out some article. And then it was like, no, now you have to crap out 30, 50, 100 more articles to submit to all these other websites to get backlinks to this one post that’s already.

Matt (11:32):

So I did all of that and then got complete and then lost all my traffic because I was practicing this, this, this method of, of traffic building. And that’s why I’m like, I switched from not so much caring about the back links to the site, but actually making the original article so good that Google kind of naturally rewards you. And then anybody who else, anybody who’s writing articles about the same subject they’re going to Google. You you’ve come number one. And then they start to backlink to you kind of, you know, automatically and naturally. So for me, it’s just like, why w yeah, that, that was where I started spending my time. That said it takes much longer to get, you know, to get that traffic. But once you do, you’re there, like, you’re, you’re, it’s the longevity of, of not having to play this backlink game is, is for the it’s for the better.

Ziv  (12:29):

So your second business that you went into a micro niche was all about coffee. Tell us how fast did you take, did it take you on the second one to reach like mature maturity level? Because these days you make, you’re very transparent about your businesses. You share it all on money lab, and you, you, you make hundreds of thousands of dollars with your online businesses.

Matt (12:54):

Yes. That that website took two years and that whole experiment was to, okay. I, you know, it took me 14 years to, to take some university where it needed to go. Now that I’ve learned all these lessons, you know, and, and really just messing up for 17 or 14 years. Can I take all of the things that I know works on a website? And can I apply that to something new in a, in a very difficult niche? Like coffee’s not an easy one to, to rank for could I do it? And yes, the, the, I was able to do it in two years and the way that I did it, and this is unfair to anyone who’s like starting a website, I hired a writer and wrote an article every single week for two years. So by the end of two years, we had 104 articles on the website and there was no keyword research done, everything was done.

Matt (13:44):

And this was, this was a mistake that I, I, again, if I were to go back and do it again, I would, I would’ve done it differently, but we, I was a coffee drinker and really interested in the subject. And so I just sat there and wrote a hundred questions that I had about coffee, and basically had the writer just write an article and publish it every Monday for two years. And we ended up getting up to about a hundred thousand visitors a month with no backlink building no marketing whatsoever, no social media just publishing articles and, you know, doing, you know, and having the site be really fast and all those things and then we ended up making, you know, in the first year or two because I ended up selling the site for, and I’ll, I’ll explain that too.

Matt (14:31):

But like, I, you know, it had, it had had Amazon not, you know, cut our commission rate. It probably would’ve been making like upwards of like $80,000 a year. You know what I mean? So by its second year, which is unbelievable. And, and I know that the person who bought was able to scale that ridiculously by just writing more articles and getting up to like, you know, millions of visitors a month. So yeah, it’s it. Yeah. It’s possible to do in a short period of time, but you have to be dedicated to like doing the, the right.

Ziv  (15:09):

And you did sell it at some point and which you explained actually quite in depth in your blog. So what we’ll do is we’ll put a show in the show notes, we’ll put the link to where they can listen to that and learn more about that. But I want to ask you, like, in those two years of literally just doing high quality content in the coffee niche, did you already use like what you teach in your SEO for bloggers course which is the method of like creating a one stop shop for a topic? Did you already know that?

Matt (15:43):

Yeah, that was all, yeah. I had already known that. What, I didn’t know, well, I didn’t know this, but I didn’t practice this during those two years keyword research. So when you mix the, you know, the power of like writing good content, so it’s like, I did things in kind of reverse. It’s like I was, I started my career really early with keyword, like aggressive keyword research and going after long tail, you know, like just really, you know, an unsexy unfun part of like writing content of doing any online business or at least a media business. And so I did, I started with that and then I got away. And then once I switched over to like, all right, well, forget about keyword research. Let’s just work on the content itself, which is what Corbett BARR had taught me. And I was kind of like, well, then we don’t really need to do the keyword research part.

Matt (16:30):

We just, we can just focus on making high-quality one-stop shop type of content. And I don’t mean that in like a lengthy way. I just mean like trying to cover the topic as in-depth, as you possibly can in the shortest amount of words. And from there, I went back and started to relearn keyword research after that experiment, you know, after those two years and went, man, if I had mixed those two strategies together, you know, aggressive keyword research plus, you know, that really high quality content it’s, it would have been game I would have gotten, you know, to a much bigger position and a much, much more traffic, much more income in those same two years, but way, way more had I just had, I just like, you know, done some keyword research and prioritized my content schedule based on that. So yeah, I that’s, yeah, that’s basically

Ziv  (17:26):

It. If you had to like choose a niche right now to start another business, to write about what would be your, your way of like making the decision.

Matt (17:40):

I would probably start from a product perspective. I’ve, I’ve certainly shifted my, you know, like when I first started swimming diversity, my monetization strategy was selling ads on, on, you know, basically and affiliate marketing, those two methods, those two methods of monetization, the unfortunate part of that is that it requires a, a lot of traffic, like insane I’m out of traffic to actually make good money from that. Which is which is, you know, it requires a lot of content creation in a lot of like that’s a lot of discipline in, if I were to start something from scratch again, I would start with a digital product of some kind, like I would S I would create a course or a software product, or so I would have have the monetization product down first. I would not be doing affiliate marketing. I would not be selling advertising at all.

Matt (18:41):

I would start with that because with that, you can, you now have many different methods to selling that product, right? You can, you don’t have to start a content business if you don’t want to, if you had some seed money, you can invest in Facebook ads or paid advertising and just drive traffic directly to it and just sell the thing as is, I know companies that don’t have blogs, that’s what they do. They just sell via that. And that just gives you the option. Not saying I would do it that way, but that’s a certainly an option and then work in reverse. So knowing what my product is and go, okay, like now I’m now I need to write content to rank on Google, but I want to make sure that I’m attracting the right people on Google that are going to find my article, read it and go, this guy knows what he’s talking about.

Matt (19:26):

Oh, he’s got a course, a software that helps me with the same thing. Great. So that way, at least the traffic that I’m building, I know is going to convert into sales, because if I was just doing affiliate marketing, I’m playing this game now where, you know, I have to, I’m recommending the same product over and over and over again, which is great, but I’m only making, you know, 10% maybe, you know, on, on the sale when I could be the creator of that product and make, you know, 90% or even close to a hundred percent depending on what the product is. So it’s, that’s certainly like where I think highway things differently, like currently with I have a site that I got into called brew cabin, cause I’m a home brewer. I went about it the other way, which is like, I started with content first and got some traffic and now I’ve just built a course and started selling that.

Matt (20:18):

And it’s like, okay, well now I have to connect the dots. And so now I kind of have to like go, oh, you know, I have this product and now I have to like kind of work backwards and not every single one of my articles is going to like, do a great job at selling that product, you know, because some of those articles are affiliate articles or, you know, not really based around the topic of the course. So that’s what I, that’s how I would do it. Because again, you know, that monetization strategy, you’re in much more of where your dollar comes from because you know, I’ve been burned by Amazon twice. And I do not, I don’t feel like having to rely on Amazon for my income. I just, I just really makes me sick that they can at any given point go, Hey, we’re just going to give you less money for doing the exact same thing. That’s like, okay, that’s basically the same as working for a boss and no, thank you. So I still do it, but it’s, I consider it like extra money as opposed to you know, the, the main source of income,

Ziv  (21:19):

Even Missy. This has been great. And there’s so much to talk about with you because you, you just go into these micro niches and you build businesses and you serve those people. So it’s wonderful. Give us three reasons why we should all go right now to money lab.co and learn more about those experiments that you do though.

Matt (21:40):

Honesty, transparency, and entertainment.

Ziv  (21:46):

And I would I would say I’m into all of these because you can go to manila.com right now and get all of that and much, much more. You can actually learn the different ways that like totally all the, all the tactics, all the strategies, all the, the techniques, the tools that Matt uses in his different businesses, online in how he’s making money, what not just how he makes money, but also how he like, basically loses money. When, when making a mistake, you’re always a very transparent. So guys, head over to money, lab.co and check [inaudible] out. You will be glad that you did. Thank you so much, Matt. It’s been a pleasure to have you here in the podcast and I’ll talk to you soon, man. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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