One of the first email lists I ever created was in the muscle building niche.

I was in high school at the time and had a body type that some people in the fitness business call a “Hardgainer”.

That meant it was hard for me to gain muscle no matter how much I worked out or how much I ate. So off I went to good ol’ Google in search of answers.

I found a guy named Jeff Anderson who at the time was selling lots of fitness infoproducts online. One of those products was called “Hardgainer Project X”, except the version I bought wasn’t even the final product yet.

What I bought was a $17 ticket to be a guinea pig or a “human lab rat” as Jeff called it.

There was a small group of us who paid Jeff to be a part of the “human lab rat” group who would do the workout as instructed for a total of 12 weeks, report our results, and then have us be the success stories for the launch of his program.

Part of the deal was that I would also have the opportunity to become an affiliate of his programs which meant that I could now refer people to Jeff and if anyone bought anything, I would get a 75% commission from that.

Exciting, huh?

As a high school student, I thought it was simply amazing that someone would pay me most of the revenue from the sale of a product that wasn’t even mine!

Anyway, one of the tips Jeff gave us to promote his Hardgainer Project X product was to “build an email list”.

He said… “Here’s how to do it. Create a free guide or resource of some kind and give it away for free in exchange for an email address. Keep doing that over and over and stay in touch with your email list. Eventually some of them will buy the products and you’ll make a commission.”

So off I went.

– I bought a domain name called NonGenetic.com (I don’t own that domain any longer) – the idea behind that was that I would share tips with other skinny guys who wanted to beat their “hardgainer” genetics.

– I took my transformation pictures from the 12 week program and uploaded them into an old online program (Animoto – that service is still around today) that turned my pictures into an awesome looking video.

– I then uploaded that video to Youtube and over the next few months it received over 133k views. I started at 115 lbs and gained 22 lbs of muscle (and a visible six pack) in 12 weeks. Don’t ask me if I have one now lol!

– In the description of that Youtube video, I linked people to a landing page where I had another video I recorded using an old software called Camtasia that recorded me flipping through Powerpoint slides. The video promised them 3 simple but effective tips that I used to transform my body, in exchange for their email address of course.

– That list grew organically without any paid ads and every week I’d send them 2-3 emails with tips and I would then recommend the Hardgainer Project X program.

The only problem?

Out of everyone who joined that email list and after several months of consistently sending tips, content, and recommending the program, I had less than 10 people actually buy the program!

Granted, I was not as skilled at selling back then but still, only 10? There had to be a better way.

After some research I decided to try a different approach. I used Google Search Ads and set it up so that anytime someone typed a relevant keyword, I’d have my ad show up in the sponsored section.

That little strategy paid off!

I was now getting about one sale per day, sometimes two.

Unfortunately, I was not building a list out of it because I was sending people directly to Jeff’s sales page via my affiliate link (by the way this is no longer Google compliant today).

That experience taught me a couple of things…

Thing #1 – There are different levels of “buyer intent”

On one end of the spectrum you have someone who is merely interested in the topic and is willing to consume content but is not yet ready to buy anything (and may never be ready ever). I.e. Many of the people who joined my list via the video they saw on Youtube.

On the other end, you have people who are searching for a solution to a pressing problem right then and are ready, willing, & able to PAY for a solution to their problem. I.e. People who searched for something on Google, clicked on my ad, and then bought the Hardgainer Project X program right then.

Thing #2 – A buyer is a buyer is a buyer.

Once someone has bought something they are more likely to buy more things.

For example, after paying $17 to be a “human lab rat” for Jeff’s program, I then went on to buy ALL of his programs over time. Why? Well a) because I like to buy things and b) because I already trusted Jeff and had gotten results from that initial program I used.

So what does all of this have to do with making profits from small email lists?

It’s simple really.

In fact, you may have already guessed it.

The key to profiting from small email lists starts with “WHO” is on your email list in the first place.

What you want to have is an email list of buyers. I’ll take a small buyers list over a larger prospect list any day. Why? Because a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. And as long as you continue producing value for them to purchase, they will buy because that is what they do. (Assuming they had a great experience with the first product they bought from you).

So, How Do You Profit From Small Email Lists?

Create a buyers list.

You can do this by…

1 – Creating a small & targeted info-product that solves a pressing problem your market is desperate to solve.

2 – Sell it low – $3-$39. You can sell it for more if you want but the point here isn’t profit first, it’s volume. The lower your price the more buyers you’ll get on your list.

3 – From there you can make your profits by selling other programs of yours or recommending other people’s products that you make a commission on.

Over the years working with different clients and my own businesses, I’ve found that buyers lists tend to convert a whole lot better than an email list of people who signed up for a freebie. By how much exactly?

Well just recently I did an affiliate promotion to one of the lists I manage and we sold 77 items with one email to a list of 17k buyers. We then paid to send that same email to a huge list of 400k people (23x larger than the buyers list) and only got 30 buyers from that.

The main difference between both lists? One was generated by selling a product while the other was generated by people signing up for a free phone app.

Does that mean you should never build a list of prospects? No. Building a prospect list is good too (and there are some reasons to do this as well) but if you want to keep things lean and not pay a huge bill to your autoresponder software for housing all those leads, then I’d start with a buyers list.

See you next time…

-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx

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If you’re already paying for traffic to your offer or if you are planning on doing so shortly, then here’s a strategy you can “bolt-on” to increase your sales by about 10-30%.

Of course individual results will vary but so far I’ve been seeing an extra 10-30% bump in daily sales from this strategy. And on a couple of occasions it’s as much as doubled our sales with a spend of about $15-$25 in extra advertising.

It involves memes, news stories, and generally anything that your market finds interesting.

Here’s the big picture…

You’ve probably already heard about retargeting and how you can show ads to people who have visited your website (I’ve also talked about this in a previous email).

But did you know that you can also target people based on their behavior ON facebook?

For example, one of the things you can track is engagement with any of your posts or ads. So for example, if you posted something on your page organically and you get 10 likes, then you can retarget those 10 people with paid ads if you wanted to.

What I do is create an audience of anyone who has engaged with any post or ad in the last +2 days. You can set this window for longer if you wanted (7 days, 15 days, 30 days, etc) but I’ve found 2 days works great.

Then I create a couple image ads or video ads with a testimonial from a customer or something similar and I target everyone in that “engaged with any post ad in the past 2 days” audience. You can set the budget for this campaign at $10-$15/day to start. If it’s successful then you can raise it to $25/day+.

This isn’t necessarily a breakthrough strategy.

However, what makes this strategy particularly effective is what TYPE of content you post on your page.

The key to making this strategy pay off for you is to post content to your page that has already proven to be SHAREABLE.

This means you don’t have to create 2-3 original pieces of content yourself. Not everyone likes to create that much content daily.

In fact, if you create all the content yourself then it’s likely you won’t get the same results than if you do it this other way.

The way to make sure you are posting shareable content is to find content that has ALREADY been shared lots of times.

So the strategy works like this…

Step 1 – Find relevant Facebook pages in your market. Make a list of the top 3-5 pages and then a list of the next 3-5 in terms of size and engagement.

You don’t have to be exact with this, just find some pages that have large audiences and are consistently posting content.

Step 2 – Identify content they’ve posted that is already getting lots of reactions (likes, loves, etc) and lots of shares and comments.

Oftentimes these posts will be memes, news stories, inspirational/motivational posts, or funny videos that are related to the topic.

Sometimes you’ll find controversial topics as well that can be useful but you’ll have to be careful with controversial topics as you don’t necessarily want to alienate any particular “side” away from your page.

Step 3 – Once you’ve identified 3 good posts across the top 3-5 pages, you can then click “Share” and then “Share to a Page” and then select your page. Do this for each of the posts you found.

You’ll be prompted to enter a description for your post. Add a line or two to tease what the post is about.

Step 4 – Repeat this process and share 2-3 “viral” posts to your page from other pages.

You can cycle through the different pages and not necessarily share the content from the same pages all the time. Variety is good. Of course, you’ll still be posting your own content as well.

With consistency, your Facebook page fans & followers will engage with these posts by clicking “Like”, commenting, or sharing it to their personal profile.

All of these engagers will then be added to your engagement audience and will be shown your “paid ads” for 2 days after they interacted with the post on your Facebook page.

Initially you’ll get few interactions but sometimes some posts that you share can get hundreds of engagements and in some instances you’ll hit a vein of something popular and your shared post can go “viral” as well and get thousands of engagements. Everyone who engaged with it (or any of your posts) will then see the ads you created for 2 days after.

And at $10-$15/day or even $25/day in advertising investment you will see a decent return!

In May we did 2.2 return on ad spend for this particular campaign.

And this month, after getting better at identifying shareable content we are seeing a 4.53 return on ad spend for this particular “engagement” campaign.

This campaign will not be your main money maker but it’s a nice way to increase your profits or make up for losses on other campaigns.

Step 5 – Stay consistent with your content shares.

Eventually you’ll get a feel for what type of content your Facebook page fans and followers like to engage with and you can start creating some of this type of content yourself.

Occasionally you’ll want to refresh the paid ads you are using for this campaign but even if you don’t you’ll see a nice return on ad spend and a nice bump to your daily sales.

Quick Tip: If you’re not already doing this, click on the “reactions” to each of your content posts and next to their name you’ll see a button that says “Invite”. You can then click that button to invite that person to like your page. Do that to each of your posts (and your ads too) and you’ll start growing your page follower count faster. And that means you’ll have more people that can engage with your daily posts.

Try it and let me know how it goes!

See you next time…

-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx

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Who am I kidding, there’s no such thing as a “low maintenance” business lol.

There are always a number of things to “maintain” in business but there are ways you can design your business so that it takes less time and effort to run (and so that it fits your lifestyle better too).

Most of the coaches & consultants who find me tend to share some common struggles.

They’re tired of being on calls all the time.

Consulting calls, strategy sessions, summits, group q&a’s, etc.

They enjoy what they do but it can also be draining at times and so they reach out for help on how to create something that is more “low maintenance” or at least something with less tail.

Meaning that once you sell something you don’t have to do extra work to fulfill what you sold.

My suggestion is almost always the same.

Step 1 – Transition part (or all) of your business to info-products.

Why info-products?

Because once an info-product is created, you can sell it over and over again without any tail.

You may occasionally update the Ebook, audio, or video series, but for the most part that’s the end of your work on the info-product.

You can minimize the number of updates you need to make by choosing a more evergreen topic rather than something that changes every few months.

Step 2 – Simplify everything down to 2 SKUs.

SKU #1 is a simple E-book, audio, or video series that solves a specific pain point your market has. This product is usually priced at $100 or below. This is what you’ll use to acquire customers.

Then…

SKU #2 is another info-product that goes deeper into the topic, more “Advanced” content or something that is more comprehensive rather than just the one pain point you solved with SKU #1. This product can be priced anywhere from $197 – $1,000+ depending on your niche. This product is where you’ll make most of your profit. You can sell this as a 1-click upsell to your first product.

Step 3 – Spend a few months creating, testing, and improving a solid sales page for your SKU #1 product.

If you do this part right, your sales page can last years with little to no changes.

One of the sales pages I’ve written so far has lasted for 4+ years with little to no changes, has generated over 17,000+ customers and is still going strong despite a price increase we made on the front-end product.

Another one generated 20,000+ customers over a 5 year period with little to no changes as well.

Of course, it helps to be in an evergreen niche where things don’t change very often!

Step 4 – Simultaneously, during those same few months, work on building a stable of working ads that you can rotate throughout the year.

It’s a simple fact that ads will wear out.

They work great initially but then will drop in performance as time goes on.

The mistake most people make however is that once an ad stops working they just toss it in the trash never to be seen again.

Instead of doing that, find a series of ads that work really well to get people over to your sales page. Once they stop working just put them back in your “ad box” and a few months later you can use it again with similar results to when you initially launched it.

Step 5 – Set Up 30 Day Retargeting Campaigns On Google & Facebook

These are campaigns that will show ads to people who visited your sales page but did not buy immediately.

This is like having a 30-day email autoresponder except instead of seeing you in their inbox (which some of them will via Gmail ads) they will also see you on Facebook, Search, and on Banner ads on almost every site they visit for the next 30 days.

These campaigns are pretty much “set it and forget it” type campaigns and usually deliver a great ROI because they catch a lot of buyers who had planned to buy but for whatever reason were interrupted on their first visit.

Step 6 – During the same few months, work on improving your Upsell Copy (that sells Sku #2)…

…so that you get an increasing numbers of Sku #1 buyers to “upgrade” to Sku #2 right away.

The more sku #2 buyers you get the more profit you’ll make.

***

At this point, your “maintenance” is your focus on three key things…

Thing #1 – What does it cost me to acquire a customer?

You do this by taking your total advertising investment and dividing it by your total number of customers. That is your Customer Acquisition Cost.

Thing #2 – Do I make more revenue than that from sales of SKU #1 & #2 combined?

Take your total revenue from sales of SKU #1 & #2 and divide it by your total number of customers. This is your Average Order Value.

Thing #3 – To make the spendable cash I want each month, how many customers do I need to get each month/day?

Take the difference between your Average Order Value and your Customer Acquisition Cost. That is your NET average order value.

Then take whatever spendable cash you want to make each month and divide that by your NET average order value and that will give you the # of new customers you need to get each month.

If you want the daily number then you can divide that monthly number by about 30 days.

So let’s say it costs you $70 to acquire a customer and your average order value is about $200, then your NET average order value is $130.

Let’s say you wanted to make $10,000 spendable cash each month, then you know you need to get about 77 new customers each month (maybe a little more than that if you want to account for your merchant processor fees) – that’s a little under 3 new customers each day.

The best part about all this is every sale you make does not require any strategy sessions, no consulting calls, no group q&a’s, and almost no tail because these are info-products. Of course there will still be some customer service emails to handle and things like that but nothing too bad.

Having said all that…

While it’s a simple business model that is generally “lower maintenance”, it is NOT easy to set up and can take several months or even a year or two to fully dial-in everything to the point that you can “coast” and make more or less by simply turning a few dials up or down. That’s the truth, no matter how fast the gurus say it can be done.

However, if you’re wanting to cut some or all of the consulting calls, phone-time, or zoom-time out of your life then this may be a worthwhile solution for you.

You can run this as an additional profit-center to something you are already doing that you enjoy and reduce some of your “consulting/phone/zoom time” OR you can replace it altogether if that’s what you want.

See you next time…

-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx

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I remember in Elementary school one of my favorite parts of the day was recess.

The teacher would clap her hands to let us know it was time for recess and you’d see the faces of 20+ little kids just light up with excitement.

I was one of them.

And one of the first things we’d all do when the teacher took us out was run over to what I remember as the “slide from hell”.

It was an old metal slide that would be piping hot…

Would burn you on the way down…

And showed no mercy, especially on days I wore shorts!

Even still, we had a blast going down it.

The game was how many different ways could we get down it? On our butts, on our backs, upside down on our backs, upside down on our front, on our knees (in pants), sideways, etc.

To this day I still remember the sound of friction it would make when my skin rubbed against the metal. I’ll never forget that.

And I’m reminded of it everytime I see a sales page out in the wild that has so much friction on it, I have to wear pants just to slide down the page!

If you’ve got a sales page for your product or if you’re working on one, you want to make sure that thing is SMOOTH.

You want your sales page visitors to be able to slide right down it, even if they’re wearing shorts ;-).

The first place to check for friction is…

Points of Disbelief

Read through your sales page as if you were a prospect or have a prospect go through it with you on a Zoom call.

Where would you call b.s.?

Which points are unbelievable?

Is there something you say that contradicts what you’ve said previously on the page?

All of these cause friction and will have your sales page visitors bouncing faster than a spooked cat.

The quick fix is to find every point of disbelief and add proof right under it. If you made a claim, is there a study that backs it up? Do you have a testimonial that addresses that particular objection? Is there 3rd party social proof you can show to turn a…

“That’s b.s.!”

Into a…

“Oh wow, that’s interesting, I didn’t know that was possible…”?

If so, add it and see how it improves your conversions.

But don’t stop there…

Adding proof works great, but it will still be a bumpy slide down the page if you’ve got the ORDER of beliefs wrong.

The better fix is to ask yourself…

What does my prospect believe now?

And…

What are all the beliefs they need to have in order for them to be in a position to purchase my product?

More specifically, what do they need to believe about their problem…

And what do they need to believe about the solution…

…in order for them to be in a position to believe that YOUR product is the right fit for them at that precise moment?

Jot down the list of those beliefs and then organize them in order of what they need to believe first, second, third, fourth, fifth… etc.

Then your sales page is essentially you knocking down existing beliefs and replacing them with new beliefs one by one in sequential order.

So that by the time they reach the bottom of your sales page, they are ready to click that buy button or take whatever your desired action is.

Here’s an Example

There was an ad that came out in the New York Times in 1966 to “Save the Grand Canyon”.

The headline read…

“Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon From Being Flooded… For Profit”

From a birds-eye view the order of beliefs in the ad were…

1 – The Grand Canyon is in trouble.
2 – They are trying to flood it.
3 – They are doing it for profit.
4 – You are the only one that can save it.
5 – The only thing that can stop it is your prompt action.
6 – Letters and wires are effective.
7 – Send the pre-written letters we’ve attached to the president, the secretary of the interior, to your congressman, and to your senators.
8 – Also send us a form to join the Sierra Club, we’re a non-profit that believes in “the preservation of the world”.

If you take the time to read it, you may even find more nuanced beliefs the ad writer wanted to get across.

But the big picture flow of beliefs is the same…

Beliefs about the problem → Beliefs about the solution.

That will build a solid argument for why your prospects should buy your product and if you do it right, you’ll start to get more sales – with little to no “slide” burns!

See you next time….

-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx

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So today I’ve got a pretty bad toothache.

It actually started yesterday.

My Dad came over because I’m showing him how to edit & upload videos he’s been recording to his new Youtube Channel.

He brought some Panda Express over and a large cup of sweet tea to eat & drink while we played chess before “work”.

I’m thinking all the sugar in the drink plus whatever sugar is in the food plus whatever sensitivity I already have to cold drinks and hot temperatures came together to agitate what I’m guessing is an existing cavity.

I will be making a dentist appointment pronto (only got 4 hours of sleep last night due to the pain)!

Today, I’ve been doing my best to focus on other things to distract myself from the pain but you know what…

I’ve already seen at least 3 emails today with the word “tooth” in the subject line that I probably would have just ignored if I didn’t have this toothache.

Looks like the saying is true…

You see what you focus on.

I.e. If you’re focused on the color red, you will start to notice red everywhere. Red cars, red buildings, red doors, red whatever.

In this same way, if you’re focused on your business and how you can help your customers solve their problems…

You will see opportunities everywhere!

Opportunities for new products, new offers, more relevant messaging, new traffic channels, anything.

And if you’re focused on your lack of something, like not knowing how to do Facebook Ads, not being skilled at marketing, not being tech savvy, not having something that’s perfect or “just so”, or not getting the results you hoped for…

Then that’s all you’ll see and it will hold you back from making progress in your business.

For example…

One of the opportunities I’ve dived into for customer acquisition recently is an alternative traffic source to Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads are still the primary traffic source for one of the businesses I’m involved with but with costs rising and our cost per order going up, we’ve had to look for other ways to compensate.

Now, instead of focusing on our cost per order going up with Facebook Ads, I focused on how else can we reach that specific audience.

We’ve started reaching out to email newsletter owners in the niche with an offer to pay them a fee to send a dedicated email to their subscribers.

Some are apprehensive to do this but many are for it and we’re seeing fantastic results.

In fact, not only do we get a nice surge of orders on the day that email goes out directly from that email (many times doubling our average number of daily orders), but for several days after we also see a bump in sales from our Facebook Ads & Google too. Why?

Because those same people who opened the email & clicked are now seeing our ads & retargeting ads on Facebook & Google AND it’s also driving searches like “Product name + reviews” or similar keywords and we make sure our ads show up for those terms.

This has brought our overall cost per order down significantly and helps a ton with profitability.

So, take an inventory of what you’re focusing on.

Is it serving you?

Or is it holding you back?

Should you be focusing on something else instead?

See you next time….

-Eddys Velasquez
DigitalMarketingRx

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