Master Class:

{What is the Wistia Embed URL?:2}

Report Bugs

Transcript(show)

DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT

Report Bugs

Transcript(show)

The reason I invited Robert on here because when interviewed him for Mixergy he said that people, that entrepreneurs, specifically used to give him a piece of their business in order to have him do the marketing for them. One of the key areas of marketing that he did was online webinars. He’d get a lot of people to watch and then from there he get a lot of those people to buy. And so I said, “Robert, please, please come on here to Mixergy and teach us how to get that audience for that webinar.” And Robert, that’s why you’re here.

Robert: Hi, good to be on the call.

Andrew: Thanks for being on here. Now I want to show people the pain of not doing marketing right, and I hate to bring it up again, but it’s a pain that you experienced. Here is a photo of you and your wife from back when you guys ran this previous business. What was the business?

Robert: It was called Vippo. I look like about 18 in that photo.

Andrew: And you look really happy and eager in that photo. I’m guessing you were expecting good times back then.

Robert: Oh, I was pumped. I thought I was going to take over the world and retire after 12 months.

Andrew: So how many millions of dollars did the business make?

Robert: 0.00003, or something like that. So it wasn’t, it didn’t work out as well as we would have hoped. To cut a long story short, I was working in the corporate world doing really, really well, climbing the corporate ladder, and I had a great idea that I would start a video production business with my wife. Now the thing is, this was in 2010 and video was starting to get a little bit more mainstream for online, but it was still very early days. YouTube was only a few years old, and I had this great idea that I could be one of the first ones to market and offer online video for clients. I’d go to all these businesses and they’d pay me a lot of money to do their online videos and it’d be really easy.

The thing was it didn’t work out that way. Because it was so early to market, the cost of production was still quite high and it still wasn’t as mainstream as it is today, and it was a lot harder to convince businesses to take us on than I thought it would be. So we spent a good 12 months, me and my wife. We worked not full-time but double full-time, all day and all night, the both of us. And you can see that was when we started the business and were really happy. After 12 months we were exhausted. We haven’t worked that hard in our whole life.

Andrew: Hard work, and you only brought in $30,000 a year from that business, after all the hard work among the two of you and you ended up closing down the business.

Robert: That’s correct, yeah, because it is just too hard. It wasn’t working and sometimes you’ve got to swallow your pride and just say, “Look, it didn’t work, and we’re going to pull out and just [inaudible 00:03:16] that does work.

Andrew: We all had the challenges with marketing. That’s one of the reasons why people are listening to us here today, to avoid that kind of problem and to find something that actually works. The way I work here at Mixergy. I’m kind of a jerk because you volunteer and everyone volunteers to do interviews here and to teach here on Mixergy, and one of the first things I say is if you’re going to teach something, prove it. You actually did. You said, “Here.” Here is a screenshot from proof that you gave our producer. What is this that we’re looking at, exactly, and why is this proof that you know what you’re talking about?

Robert: You’re looking at the stats from Google Analytics for a webinar that we ran about a year and a half ago. This webinar was for a nutritionist and we had, like you can see there, over 7000 people register to attend this webinar. That’s a huge number. It’s an absolutely huge number. Most people are lucky to get 100 or 200 on a webinar, but this was just an absolutely out of the park raging success because we did everything right, and we’re going to show you how to do that today.

Andrew: Okay. That’s over 7000. 7889 people hit the Thank You page on the webinar, which means that they registered to watch a webinar, and every one of them . . . or not every one of them will actually show up live, but we’ll talk about how to get more of them to come to the live event.

But then once they’re there at the webinar, you teach and you sell, and that’s why these webinars are so powerful. If you get enough people in the room it creates an energy and they all become potential customers, and you close all those sales right there in one day, in one event as opposed to waiting for the ads to work and conversion rates on website. Right?

Robert: Absolutely, and it’s kind of like, I call these webinars online seminars because it’s kind of like the way that you used to run seminars back in the day where you get all the people in a room, you do a presentation, and you make an offer. And then some people buy it and some people don’t.

The thing is, if you’ve got an international audience like you and I do, Andrew, we can’t run global tours every day of the week. It’s just not practical and not cost-effective. So we can run webinars where people can have a similar kind of experience but do it from the comfort of their own home. And it’s great because you’d have to hire an event crew, staff, all that kind of stuff. There are so many expenses when you run live events in person.

Andrew: Essentially, all you need is a GoToMeeting account.

Robert: That’s it.

Andrew: What software do you use for your webinars?

Robert: GoToMeeting, because this one was a lot more than that, we had to use a different platform because GoToMeeting cuts out at about 1000 users. It just couldn’t handle that kind of volume.

Andrew: You guys are getting more than 1000 users to come in all at once? All right. I’m getting about this. I want to learn for myself because I’ve seen that we at Mixergy have gotten good sales from webinars. I want to learn how to get more people in there.

Let me go up to the big board here. These are the different steps we’re going to use to get people to come to our webinars. The very first one on there is to identify your starving crowd. The people who have those pain points, you want to find and understand those pain points. You actually had a customer who was a nutritional client, right?

Robert: Yes.

Andrew: That’s what she was doing. She had only so much time in the day. She wanted to reach more potential customers. She partnered up with you, and how did you find the pain that her customers have? And we’ll talk later about how to use it. But how did you find it?

Robert: My client spent six years doing one-to-one consultations with women, helping their health challenges using nutritional tactics. She had all that data of what women were going through in their life. The sad thing about this is I learned way too much about women’s health than I really wanted to learn, but at the end of the day, women have a lot of health challenges and they’re really confused about what happens with their bodies. That was the biggest thing that came out of what she did.

So I went to the client and I said, “Look, you’ve worked with women for six years one-on-one. You’ve seen literally thousands and thousands of women. Can you tell me the eight biggest challenges that women have when they come to you?” So she said, “Okay, here’s what the eight biggest challenges are. I’m going to write them down.” I said, “That’s good.”

Andrew: Here’s some of them. I think you’ve given them to us before this session started. We’re looking at things like, I routinely feel bloated, I suffer from PMS, I can’t lose weight no matter how much I diet and exercise, and this is just you writing it all down.

Robert: That’s correct. This is exactly what she told me, and they’re ranked from one to eight. The most pain was the bloated one. Nearly all the women that went to her were suffering from bloating. That was the biggest pain point.

Andrew: I wonder what it is to suffer from bloating. I hate to sound so ignorant here but I don’t know.

Robert: What it means is that in practical terms you fit into your jeans perfectly in the morning, and then by the end of the day you feel like taking the button off because you can’t fit in them anymore.

Andrew: I see.

Robert: We’re joking about it here, but it’s actually quite a serious health challenge that women have, and it’s very confusing because a lot of them don’t know why it happens. They’re not eating a whole lot of food. They’re not going to McDonald’s and buying chips and burgers and Coke. They’re not doing that. There are a number of reasons why it happens. I’m not a nutritionist. I don’t want to give the answers on here because I am not qualified to say, but what we did was we promised that if they came to the webinar they would learn the solutions to these problems from my doctor nutritionist client.

Andrew: I see. That’s why you want to identify those big problems, because when you’re talking about feeding a starving crowd, you mean what it that they’re starving for a solution for? Am I right?

Robert: Yes. Think about it this way. If you’ve got bloating as a health challenge, if you wake up in the morning and you fit into your jeans perfectly; end of the day, you can’t fit into them anymore, you’re wondering what the hell is going on? What is going on here? And if you’ve been to other doctors and people before and they can’t help you, and then you have a nutritionist who’s a doctor, who has a PhD in this that says, “If you come on to this webinar, I’m going to show you solutions, how to fix this up.” That’s a starving crowd, and that’s a key reason why we had so many people come on, because the information was good, and people really wanted to find out what was happening.

Andrew: Robert, I thought what you were going to say is create a survey, find potential customers, survey them, and you’re saying in this case it was as easy as talking to the person who talked to all those customers in the past and having her just remember what were those big issues where. Write them down one to eight in order.

Robert: That’s right. And look, in my book I’ve got lots of other ways you can find a starving crowd as well. Some people who haven’t had six years of experience serving clients, and it’s not as easy as that. You might have to go do some research. There are a lot of different ways you can find a starving crowd. This is one of them, and this is the best one. If you’ve had physical one-to-one interactions with the clients, that’s the best way to find out what their problems are because they’ve told you for six years.

Andrew: Good point. I know a lot of entrepreneurs have to go out and talk to customers to understand them before getting started because they don’t have much experience with their customer base. You’re saying to understand what their issues are, and if you’ve talked to them already you know it. Sit down, write it down in order, so that you’re aware of what the top priority issue is, and all the way down the line. And that’s what you did with this collection here. I don’t even know that I need to show it again, but there. I just like to see how you’ve done it. I feel tired and wired, I have trouble sleeping at night, I’m a happy person but sometimes I feel sad for no reason, etc.

So now that we’ve identified the big pain points that our crowd has, the next step to talk about is having a success story for each pain point.

Robert: That’s why it’s okay, because it’s all well and good to have this pain points, so if you’ve got bloating or you can’t sleep at night or you feel wired, any of those kind of things, that’s all well and good. A lot of people have those challenges. What they want to know is do you actually have a solution and can you help me?

So to get more people to come to the webinar, we gave examples of how my nutritionist client actually delivered these results to people already. Her marketing wasn’t just saying, “Hey, come to the webinar, come to the webinar, come to the webinar,” the marketing was, “Hey, here’s the ten pain points. We’re going to send you one email for each of these pain points and tell you a story about how someone had this challenge, then came to my client and then got all fixed up as a result of the strategies that they learned. And we’re going to show you these strategies in the webinar.

Andrew: Let me look at one of this emails. This is kind of email that you sent out. Do you mind if include this here with the session for people to look at on their own time?

Robert: Yes, that’s fine. We include all this in the resources page from the book, so that’s fine to share.

Andrew: I’m going to read this because of course it’s going to be too small on people’s screens and frankly they pay me to read it out for them. Here’s what’s the subject line is. It says, “Tired, Moody, Stressed Out all Day. How a burned out woman put an end to those problems.” And then the body says, “Before learning about my secrets, Angela was reaching burnout. She couldn’t lose weight no matter how hard she tried. She was so tired, moody and stressed out all the time. Her life was in turmoil and her relationships were falling apart.” So right now what we’re seeing is that Angela had the problem that your audience has.

Let’s continue with me reading it. “She tried everything to fix her problems but nothing worked but as luck would have it, she discovered my method one evening. Then she started applying them. Within a few short months . . . bullet point number one, she could manage the ongoing stress in her work and home life, bullet point number two, her relationships improved, bullet point number three, and she finally felt in control of her health, weight and happiness again.”

Continuing on, “Now Angela was just one of the thousands of women who have found blessed relief using my simple method. It can work for you, too, if you suffer from any of these ailments: bloating, digestion problems, PMS, stressing, anxiety, unexplained weight gain, cravings, poor sleep, brain fog, and be sure to . . .” and then hyperlinked, “Attend my webinar. Best regards.

So I’m seeing what you’re doing here. What you’re saying is, “Here’s a person who had the problem that you have, here is how painful it is, and here are the benefits that she got by using this thing that you can get by coming to the webinar.” That’s the way you want us to promote the webinar.

Robert: Absolutely, and see, if you read that email it doesn’t feel sales-y. It doesn’t feel like you’re pitching it. It’s actually giving a bit of value, and it’s quite entertaining to read. You can definitely send 10 of those emails with different stories addressing different pain points, because if someone has bloating, they don’t necessarily care about, you know, they can’t sleep at night. It’s a very different audience.

So by having 10 different stories for the 10 different ailments, that’s why we’re were able to get such a wide range of people to come in. If we just did one on bloating, we might have gotten less numbers, maybe about 2000 or 3000. So by having all those different symptoms and addressing them all in one webinar and having those 10 different stories, that’s why we were able to get such a large number.

Andrew: First of all, the format makes a lot of sense. What you’re doing is you’re telling a story of someone who has a problem, talking about how your solution helped, and then giving details about how it helped, without saying specifically what the person did. You’re leaving that gap in people’s minds that they want to fill in by coming into the webinar. Makes a lot of sense.

Sometimes people are launching a brand new product with a webinar, and they don’t have these success stories. What I’ve seen is, actually, what do you say to those people if they still want to make people want to come to a webinar but they don’t have those case studies.

Robert: Look, it’s a bit harder. You can definitely sort of run a webinar and get people to come, but you’re not going to get the thousands and thousands if you haven’t got proof. There are a few different ways that you can do it. You can actually be really straight with people. You can say, “Look, this is a brand new course we’re running. We’ve never run it before. We’re really excited. Here’s why we’re excited.” Because you will not have proof for yourself but you may have proof that it is working in the market for other people. And so there are different ways to do it, but the very best proof is the proof that you’ve achieved for your clients. That’s always the best one.

Andrew: That’s one of the things that I insist on here when we do with one of these master classes in Mixergy. I want the person who’s teaching it to have an example of how what he taught worked for somebody else, and sometimes people don’t have that and I have to say, “You’re just not a good fit.”

But when someone who is listening to us wants to do a webinar, if they don’t have a case study, tell me if this is a fair way to do it, to say one of my steps is to do . . . actually, you know what? Let’s suppose somebody was starting a webinar trying to teach people how to do interviews, and they’ve never done an interview before. They can still say, “Here’s a benefit that Andrew got by doing interviews, and here’s what he did.” So you’re telling Andrew’s story without taking credit for having given Andrew the methodology. You’re just saying, “Andrew’s using one of the methods that I’ll be teaching you, and here’s the success that he got.” Is it fair to do that?

Robert: Absolutely. That’s what the Napoleon Hill did 100 years ago with “Think and Grow Rich.” Napoleon Hill wasn’t rich when he wrote that book, but he interviewed 50 or 100 of the most rich people going around. Then he consolidated all the best strategies from them, and that book has been an amazing bestseller.

So you can take the reporter route, where it’s like, “Hey, look, I’ve interviewed the 10 best guys that do interviews. Here’s a snippet of what Andrew does, and I’m going to show you what the other nine guys do in the webinar. Come along.” That’s worthwhile, and I’d be up for that. I’d check that out, because that person isn’t saying, “Hey, I’m the guru on interviews.” I think you’ve just got to be authentic and straight with people, and just be really . . . if you haven’t done it before but you’ve interviewed 10 guys that did do it, and they showed you exactly what they did, that’s fine, but just say that, and then whoever comes, comes.

Andrew: I remember one of the first courses that we did on Mixergy was with Paras Chopra, the founder of Visual Website Optimizer. He said, “Look, you need case studies if you’re going to be selling these high margin products.” I said, “What if you’re new and you don’t have case studies?” He said, “Don’t get a case study for your software. Get a case study for your methodology as used by someone else when you’re getting started.” So these are workarounds for it.

Here is the next big point. I think we’ve gotten everything out of this one. The next big point is to contact your current audience everywhere. That means Facebook, it means email, it means Twitter, it means wherever they are, and invite them to come to the webinar. You did this on Facebook. In fact, before we were starting you were saying that Facebook is working really well for you. What’s working better, Facebook, Twitter, something else?

Robert: For this particular market, Facebook.

Andrew: Before this women’s health nutrition webinar?

Robert: Absolutely, yes. We only had two traffic sources for this particular webinar. We had the email database and we had Facebook advertising. Those were the only two ways that we promoted this webinar.

Andrew: And for your book, I know that you’ve been advertising this landing page, FeedAStarvingCrowd.com on Facebook. What’s worked best for you there?

Robert: It’s running an ad to go directly to the landing page, but I’m actually borrowing the credibility that I’ve got from Brian Tracy and an ad to go fix at the landing page but I’m actually borrowing the credibility that I’ve got from Bryan Tracy and Vishen Lakhiani as testimonials.

Andrew: Right there in the center. So are you buying ads with their face, with Brian Tracy’s face on it and sending it over?

Robert: Yes, absolutely, because they have given me a testimonial and permission to use their testimonial. And with testimonials what you find is that it also benefits the person that gives a testimonial as well because his brand is getting in front of literally hundreds of thousands of people with running the ad. So it helps both people, the person that gets the testimonial and the one that gives the testimonial.

Andrew: Okay. So by those ads there . . . let me see here in my notes what you’ve said. You can send out an email, a Facebook post, Twitter message, etc., for each one of the pain points that we described. So how do you turn each one of these pain points, like I feel bloated, into an ad that delivers a new attendee to your event?

Robert: See, the way that we did this was exactly the same way we did the email sequences. We told the stories in Facebook posts. The post didn’t feel spammy and saying, “Hey, come to the webinar.” We actually just gave solutions. We told the stories like we did exactly with that email. So exactly the same way we wrote the emails was exactly the same way we did the Facebook posts. That’s why it got so much engagement, because a year and a half ago no one was doing this.

If you look at nutritionists and the way they market, 99% of them say eat green vegetables and drink water. Stop eating McDonald’s and stop drinking Coke. And it was, like, come on, everybody knows that. We all know we’ve got to eat better food and stop eating bad food. We know that, but we’re not doing it. When you’re in a competitive market space like nutrition and there’s so many people out there saying the same thing, you need to be a bit creative in how you approach it. And that’s why story telling works so well, because it flies under the radar and it helps people to have a better reaction to your marketing.

Andrew: So actually, here. You’ve been open with me about as much as you can. Something strange, you sent us this tweet. It says, “Do you think about the strength body? Do you focus on improving your flexibility? Both are critical to a . . . ” and then it’s FB.ME/etc. This is your tweet linking to a Facebook post which I’m assuming then links over to the webinar page. Why did you obscure the url? Why don’t you want me to see the actual ad as you have it in Facebook? Is that intentional?

Robert: I think that’s for a different program that we ran. I think that was an example of a tweet for a different program. That wasn’t for this nutritional webinar.

Andrew: Okay. So are you in fact hiding that webinar from me, too?

Robert: No, not at all. I can’t remember which on it actually is for, to be honest with you. That was on a few months ago, so I’d have to check it out and see what it’s all about.

Andrew: Let me get a little more specific here. So if, for example, we’ve got a problem, I’ll keep going back to this “I routinely feel bloated.” How do you present it in a Facebook ad that gets people to come to a landing page and register? What do you do? What kind of ad works for you?

Robert: We use extremely similar copy to that email that you saw. So it’s long copy and it’s a photo. You test different photos, but it’s a photo of a woman who’s holding her tummy in a bit of pain. That’s what worked well for that one. And then for each of the different symptoms, you have someone who can’t sleep at night, you might show them in bed trying to toss and turn and things like that, like she was roughing up the sheets.

Andrew: And then you link to the landing page. Does the landing page talk specifically about this problem or do you have a general landing page that says “I solve all these problems.”

Robert: Yes, the same landing page that you showed at the start, that same copy. It was a really simple one page landing page, it said, “Hey, if you’re suffering from any of these symptoms, then you have to attend the webinar.”

Andrew: All right, cool. Then let’s go on to the next big point. We talked about buy ads. The next one is to get affiliate partners. Oh, actually, hang on a second. Let me see. Contact current or whatever . . . oh, sorry. We didn’t talk about buying ads. Let’s talk about . . . wait. Contact current audience everywhere. I accidentally lumped these two together, but you intentionally in my notes here have separated them. Contact current audience everywhere means for you, do a re-targeting campaign, and I think I missed that, where you upload your email list to Facebook and you say, “I want to reach my people.” Is that what you mean by that?

Robert: Yes, absolutely. And even to take it to the next level, if you haven’t got an existing email database or if you haven’t got a budget for ads, what I teach my clients is to get down and dirty, and to contact your clients in every single channel that you have. If it’s LinkedIn, if it’s Twitter, if it’s email, even if it’s business cards. If you’ve got business cards stacked up from a long time, if some of those people would be interested in what you’re doing, you could email them once personally. You can’t upload all those into a database and kind of blast them out, but if you met someone at a conference six months ago and they could come to your webinar, you can go and email them.

When you’re getting started and you haven’t got a huge database, you’re going to roll your sleeves up, and if you haven’t got a whole lot of money to spend on ads, you’ve got to contact people no matter where they are.

Andrew: I see. So that point, contact the current audience everywhere, means the people who you already are engaged with wherever they are. If you have a Twitter following go to Twitter and talk to them there. If you have a Facebook following, do that, and again, even right down to if you have business cards, email them so that you invite them over.

Robert: Get your hands dirty, absolutely. Even if get, you might have to scrape and scramble to get 50 or 100 people in a webinar, but for some people, 100 people in a webinar, that’s a good . . . if you could stand in front of a live audience and talk to 100 people, that’s still good, especially if you’re just getting started. So no matter where you are, you can still use these strategies and you don’t have to buy ads. But the thing is, you’ve got to make an investment somewhere. You’ve either got to invest your time and your sweat where you get your hands dirty and do this stuff, it’s not as glamorous, or you can run ads if you’ve budget to spend on that kind of stuff.

Andrew: Now, then, we go back to the one that I accidentally almost skipped, which is buy ads to reach a new audience. What you guys did, according to my notes, is you advertised a success story for each one of the problems, you did it with a direct call to action, you told 10 stories, your budget was $200 per post for a total of $2000, and each post told the story of one problem.

Robert: That’s right, and all we did was, it was just a normal Facebook post on the fan page, and we hit the boost post at the bottom for $200. Nothing fancy.

Andrew: And this is the kind of thing that you were . . . is this really the ad itself? Now I see what you were talking about earlier where you said a photo with some text. Is it something like this?

Robert: Yes, something like that. But if you have a cat, that’s a different example, but it was similar to that. There were some of them like that but most of them were actually stories, so actually like that story we showed you in the email, but with a better photo like I described before.

Andrew: Image, and you do the full text within the Facebook post, even though it’s long?

Robert: Yep, long copy is good. People read it. People read long copy. They read it. It works really well.

Andrew: So you do that full long text and then you would link back to your landing page, and on your landing page you would get them to register for the webinar.

Robert: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, you can take it to the next level, like, we could have for each one of those different landing pages, we could have had an article that spoke about that problem in more detail, and then had a call to action to come to the webinar after that. So you can do that, but it’s more work. It’s ten times the amount of work. You’re going to write ten more articles and then each of them has to link back to the webinar.

We just found it worked fine. If I was going to run this more often, then you probably wouldn’t need the ten articles so that you’ve got a bit more variety. Otherwise, once those people have seen that ad and then come to the webinar, then you need to kind of mix it up and do different topics.

Andrew: All right. Let’s go to the big board, and the next big thing is to get affiliate partners. These are people who are getting a share of every sale that you make within your webinar.

You approached a big name celebrity and you said, “Hey, would you please promote,” and the celebrity said, “Absolutely” right from the start.

Robert: Yes. It depends on what your relationships are. I don’t want to say you can just call any celebrity up and say hey, please promote, and they’re going to say yes. This was someone that we already had a relationship with for this particular event.

Andrew: Who is the person?

Robert: I can’t say, Andrew. That’s confidential.

Andrew: Are we talking about television celebrity or online celebrity?

Robert: Well, online for this one.

Andrew: Okay.

Robert: I can talk about my business because that’s mine and I can share that. It’s not a private client. For example, what I’ve done is with my book, I’ve deliberately sent my book to a lot of influential people that are around, and what tends to happen is if they get my book, and I send them an Australian hat as well, quite often they’ll actually take a photo with the Aussie hate with corkscrews on it which looks pretty tacky. I will send you a photo of that as well. And then they’ll have the book in their hand and the Aussie hat and they’ll say, “Thanks, Rob. This is a great book,” and they’ll post a link to my book.

Now that works fantastically well, and that’s what spoke pretty well for my book, and that’s one way you can approach it. So there are a lot of different ways you can get it to happen. I’m saying that it’s easy. I’m definitely not saying that that’s easy at all. What’s more traditional is to get traditional affiliate partners. For example . . .

Andrew: You know, what’s that? I can’t pass up what you just said right there, because frankly I’ve been Googling it on the other screen here. I never heard of an Aussie hat. This is what the Aussie hate looks like, with corkscrews just hanging out from it?

Robert: That’s it. Yeah, it’s exactly like that. And the corkscrews, do you know what the corkscrews are for?

Andrew: No.

Robert: They are to kick the flies out of your face.

Andrew: Are you, are you kidding me?

Robert: Yep. So if you got flies, in Australia we’ve got a lot of flies so you can just wear that hat and you can kind of shake your head and get the flies out of your face.
Andrew: Really? It’s not just a joke? It actually is being used in Australia?

Robert: That’s what they’re used, that’s why they do them.

Andrew: Wow. All right. So this is what you were passing out to people, and of course they would take a photo of it and say thank you, I can’t believe you just sent this over.

Robert: And here’s a photo of the book, and you know, it works really well.

Andrew: Okay. Clever idea. I can see how that would work out. How do you get people who are affiliates to start sending traffic to your webinar? What do you do?

Robert: There’s a few different ways. There’s a lot of ways you can do it. The easiest way is to actually, if you promote them first. It’s like the law of reciprocity. If you help someone first, they’re a lot more likely to help you later. That’s the very easiest way to do it, because it’s the lowest friction. Like if I approach anybody and say, “Look, can I introduce you to my audience and kind of promote your work,” nearly every single person is going to say yes. Why would you say no? And then once that’s happened, there’s a bigger chance that they’ll say, “Hey, can you help me as well?” So that works really well.

There’s other ways you can do it as well. The more traditional way is that you have an affiliate manager, and they go and approach 50 or 100 people that are in a similar category to you, and they say, “Look, here’s what our offer is. Here’s the percent of commission that we pay. Here’s the landing page, here’s the [inaudible 00:28:45] copy, would you be open to doing this to your list?” That’s the most traditional way of doing it.

But like I said, there’s a lot more creative ways you can go about it. You can send them something in the mail. You can do a favor for them in advance. And that’s what I prefer to do, rather than going the traditional route of just having all the stats, all the techniques, all the things like that. I just think it’s kind of been slammed, and I’d rather have less affiliate partners but more dedicated ones are better.

Andrew: You might send a gift of a corkscrew hat, not corkscrew, that would be painful. A cork hate, and then you’d follow up and say, “Hey, I’m doing this thing,” or actually even before, you’d offer to email your audience or support them, and then come back and ask.

Robert: That’s right, and that looks a lot better, because if you think about it from the other person’s perspective, like if I went to you, Andrew, and said, “Hey, go to all of your people that Feed a Starving Crowd. Here’s what our stat is . . . ” And you’re like, “Well, I don’t even know you, Rob. I don’t know if your stuff works, I don’t even know if it’s a good product.”

It sounds obvious, but it is important. If the show was on the other foot, you’d want to know more about that person and get to know them a lot better before you promote anyone’s work. It’s the same when you’re approaching anybody. Everyone’s the same. Everyone’s very protective of their database and they only want to be promoting stuff that’s good and that works.

Andrew: You know what? I want to ask about a photo, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m now looking at my screen. I’m looking very dark here for some reason. I wonder if somebody messed with the lights. Let’s try adjusting it.

Robert: Yes, I thought you got a suntan, I thought you’d been hanging on the beach.

Andrew: First of all, I’m always dark. I’m the darkest person in my family. I’ve got a very a white blonde wife and now we have a kid. So she’s very light, I am very dark, even the kid is lighter than me, so I’m walking around like the foreigner in my own house. But I think the light should be helping me out here. I think maybe somebody bumped into the lights and is making me look darker. Let’s adjust them. There we go. I still don’t look European but I look better.

All right. Who is this person who we were just talking, who I was just referencing?

Robert: Yes, this from my book, [inaudible 00:30:46]. This is a TV celebrity in Australia, and she and her twin sister have been featured on a home renovation show here. So what happened was the approached me and asked if I could help them with their online business, and I said, “Look, come in, spend some time in my office and I’ll help you guys out.” So I spent an hour with them. I didn’t charge them for the session, and at the end we took a photo with the book. And then she posted that to her Facebook page and she’s got 188,000 Facebook fans. What worked really well was that I got 1000 downloads in 24 hours just from that one post.

Andrew: Just from this post a thousand people had downloaded.

Robert: One post, 1000 downloads.

Andrew: Downloaded the book.

Robert: That’s how powerful this can be.

Andrew: A thousand people went from this post to this page, went to the bottom or clicked . . .

Robert: And downloaded them. And that’s just one celebrity, just one person. So that’s how powerful this stuff can be. And that’s why I’m saying good relationships, because if I went to her and I said, “Listen, can we do a sponsorship deal where you can endorse my work,” she’s going to say, “Well, okay. Fine. We’re going to spend six months doing contracts and things like that, and there’s going to be a fee.” I said, “Look, come to my office. I’ll help you out. I’ll give you some good tips.” I helped them, they started to do a lot more business online, and then they, as a result, they wanted to say thank you to me. And then they shared my work with their audience. So that worked extremely well for me, and that’s something you can do for a lot of people. You can just help them, and they’ll help you back.

Andrew: I wonder how many people are going to hear me to say FeedAStarvingCrowd.com, go type it in and go download. There’s no way for us to know. That’s my frustration, not just with this, but with podcasting in general. People watch or listen to one of my interviews, and then they’ll remember the url and go back to it. I’d love to get credit. I’d love for an interviewee to say, “I can’t believe it, Andrew. I just did this interview with you and as a result 5000 people downloaded, or even 500 people downloaded it. Somebody.

Robert: Well, Andrew, I ordered five new servers after that last interview because the Mixergy crowd, that’s going to be a hungry audience. I want to make sure that the website holds up.

Andrew: First of all, more than five and reup with cloud flair. Go to the next level of [inaudible 00:32:46].

Robert: I’m going to buy a whole data center, different types.

Andrew: It’s the only way that I’ll feel good about myself. I don’t have naturally feeling good about yourself capabilities. I have to have outward results in the world for me to feel good.

All right. Everybody who’s listening should go over to your site, FeedAStarvingCrowd.come, download it, and then find a way to conspicuously let you know that it’s because of Mixergy. But for now, let’s get back on track here. Use a reminder sequence. I never know how much to do here because, and frankly, I think I sent a reminder the day before, I think I sent a reminder the day of, and then we are going live reminder. That’s three. To me, that felt like a lot. I got emails from people saying I missed it. Why didn’t you tell me? I said dude, I sent three. So what’s the right amount? How do I not irritate people? Or maybe I did the right amount and I should accept it and be okay that some people are always going to complain. What is the right amount of reminders?

Robert: Look, the best way to do this is actually to tell some more stories in the lead-up to the event. We told similar stories to the opt-in sequence, but just kind of made them a little bit shorter, and just reminding people about why it’s going to be so good to come on.

Now, what I’ve also . . . I didn’t do this for this webinar, but I had done this for other webinars and it worked extremely, extremely well. 48 hours before the webinar starts, you send a PDF workbook, and it’s kind of like a fill in the blanks workbook where you have all the bullet points but they need to fill in the blanks when they come to the webinar to learn about what’s happening. The reason why this works so well is because firstly, people get a sneak peek of the content. Secondly, they feel that it’s going to be value, like [inaudible 00:34:27] is going to be a sales pitch. They feel that they’re actually going to learn something. Especially in our space in the marketing space, the number one reason people don’t come to webinars is because they feel it’s going to be just a sales pitch. They’re not going to learn anything. So if you can send them a workbook in advance, then they know that hey, I can learn some stuff here. And I know I’m going to get pitched at the end, but I’m going to learn stuff in the meantime so it’s worth my time to come on.

Andrew: So I’ve just actually seen this done. I would think that a workbook is a big PDF with lots of pages. It’s like I’ve seen four pages of a workbook.

Robert: That’s plenty. I’ve sent two pages, three pages, that’s fine.

Andrew: So we call it a workbook but frankly it could just be a work page, essentially. A work two pages, which I ordinarily wouldn’t think of as a workbook.

Robert: Yeah, like a worksheet, a work page. As long as it, the whole objective isn’t to say, “Look, this is good training. You’re coming here, you’re going to learn some stuff. You’re not going to be pitched through the whole time.”

Andrew: But I know my audience. Some people are just so anal and, God love ’em, that they would sit and write everything in the, that they would fill in the blanks. So if the first step, if I say the first step to doing XYZ is blank, they will fill that out because a lot of people think that way. They think by writing. Frankly, I guess I shouldn’t say that they’re anal. I’m pretty anal, too. I take notes within an interview, otherwise I’m not on track.

All right. So that’s what you mean by it, and it’s a reminder but it’s also a statement that they’re going to learn and it’s something that keeps them involved within the webinar. Give me more. What else? That’s 48 hours before. What else do I need to do to remind people to actually show up?

Robert: What else works really well is an SMS reminder. If you really want to drive your registrations to the next level, you can send two SMS’s. You can send one 24 hours before, and you can send one one hour before.

Andrew: And so you take, here’s one of yours. This is . . . let’s see if I could, I’ll read this again because it’s a text message we’re looking at. It says, “Phone number, don’t forget to join the webinar starting in two hours time. Click here to join.” And then you give a link to it.

Robert: That’s it. It’s just that simple, and it doesn’t need to be anything complex. It’s a text message, they can’t pick up that many things on there, so it’s just simple. And a lot of this stuff doesn’t need to be complex. It’s just about execution and doing it well.

So those are the two things that work. I’ll say the three things. So if you continue to tell stories before the webinar, send them a PDF workbook 48 hours before, and then send a couple of text messages. By doing that, that’s going to maximize the number of people that will come on.

Andrew: But within the last 48 hours all I’m doing is sending a webinar and text messages, or am I also sending an email the day before and the day of?

Robert: Well, you’re sending it 48 hours before, and you can send one out one day before and one hour before. Any more than that, you’re going to start annoying people, and you really don’t want to . . .

Andrew: So three emails within 48 hours plus two text messages.

Robert: Yep, and then if they registered a long time before that, a day or two before that as well, you can also send a couple of stories. And that’s it, because you don’t need to kill people. You want them to know about it, you want them to turn up, but you don’t want to be annoying.

Andrew: All right. Let’s go on now to the very last page, or the very last point here for today, which is to have the right elements on your landing page and your thank you page. Here is this template that you use. A lot of it just seems basic.

Robert: Very basic. Really, really simple.

Andrew: Help me understand what I might ordinarily miss if I were to look at it as a stranger. We intentionally kept this as just the key elements. What are the key elements?

Robert: Like I said, the event title is huge, because what a lot of people will look at is just the event title and make a decision if they’re going to come or not based on that title. Our title for this nutritionist webinar was “What in the World is Wrong With Me?”And the reason that worked so well is that it’s a very common question that people are asking my client. So they resonated that when they saw it.

The next thing was in that little box at the top we had two options for people to join the webinar. We had a 5:00 p.m. option and a 7:00 p.m. option. What blew my mind was that we had an almost equal attendance between both of those two options. I had no idea. I thought that most people would pick the 7:00 because it’s after work, they’d log in at home and watch it then. But we had an almost equal between the 5:00 and the 7:00. Like I said, it blew my mind.

Andrew: And that’s a dropdown menu that you have under, you ask people’s name and you ask their email address, then you have that dropdown menu underneath it.

Robert: Yeah, select the time. And then underneath the description on the left-hand side is we just had those eight bullet points which you showed at the start.

Andrew: There it is, on the left-hand side underneath the date and time, where you would have . . . let me see what those bullet points are. Things like, “I routinely feel bloated. I suffer from PMS. I can’t lose weight, etc.”

Robert: Yep, and then we had a little paragraph under that saying, “If you suffer from any of these symptoms, then you have to attend this webinar.”

Andrew: I see. And that’s what you want. But the key elements it seems like you want us to have two date options, excuse me, have date . . . wait. Have the dates on it and two options for different times.

Robert: Yes, and that’s because this was the first time we were running a webinar to this audience and we didn’t know which time they would want so we offered both. But as you get to know your audience better, you may just find that the majority go for one time, and then you don’t have to offer the two times. But to start with, it’s always good to offer a few different times so you get to know what people want.

Andrew: Here’s something else that you did that I hadn’t thought of. You had a . . . let me see. On the thank you page you had a call to action which asked them to share the event with their friends. What’s the incentive that they have for telling their friends?

Robert: That was huge. Nothing, nothing, but that was huge. That was absolutely huge, because well, we just had, like, there’s a lot of traffic that came to the site where it was shares from Facebook, where it wasn’t actually from the ad, it was from shares. So that was just huge. It was really big, and because I think, especially with this market, people might know friends that have the same kind of problems and they want to help out. See, if me and you were running an event about how to get more traffic to your website, well, I don’t know if that many people are going to go share it on their Facebook wall, or share that with their friends. So it depends on the market, but for that market it worked extremely well.

Andrew: Anything else that you want us to have on that confirmation page? I’m guessing a way for them to add the event to their calendars is helpful.

Robert: Yes, absolutely, that works as well. We had that there and that was about it. It wasn’t too complex. A lot of people are starting to get more fancy with this, and they’re putting videos on that landing page, and then even trying to make a pitch on that page. I haven’t done that personally myself so I can’t attest to the results, but I’d imagine it did do okay.

Andrew: Okay. All right. And there it is. We’ve covered so many different topics here today, or so many different steps to getting people to come to our webinar. Let me ask you this, Robert. If we were to do everything here on this big board and everything that you just talked about here today, what’s the one place where, one thing that might keep us from having a big audience for our event? Where is the one place where we’ll likely to make a mistake?

Robert: It’s the first one. It’s identifying the pain points, because if you’re running a webinar about a topic that no one cares about, then who’s going to come? You can do all these other things perfectly, but if the topic is not good then no one’s going to come. That’s why I wrote my book, Feed a Starving Crowd, because all the reason people don’t see it online is not because they’re not following the tactics or the strategies, it’s you’re selling something that no one wants. And so unless you really know those pain points, then all this other stuff doesn’t mean anything.

Andrew: All right. Well, thank you so much for walking us through it. I’ve seen that that’s actually a problem or a challenge throughout, finding the pain points of your customers whether you’re trying to get them to come to a webinar, trying to create a product that’s an information product, or trying to create software for them, wherever it is, the more you understand people’s pain, the more you can address it and give them a product that they’re dying to bye.

That is also one of the key ideas that you’ve been talking about. If people want to see how you market and learn from you, they can come to your website, FeedAStarvingCrowd.com and buy the book. It’s actually free. Is there shipping and handling, or something else about the download that we need to know?

Robert: The eBook is for free, and the physical book is $9.00 shipping worldwide.

Andrew: Here, I’m going to hit the download button. Let me see what the next step is on your site.

Robert: Oh, fantastic. Now I can spare you, Andrew.

Andrew: This is one simple tweak to just put . . . I hit pause on this because you and I are now talking, and then find my major business . . . actually, I shouldn’t be revealing this. People should just be going over to your site and seeing your marketing plan step by step. I like to actually see what you’re up to just because I’m curious about how you do it. Oh, this is . . . hey, what software are you using to do these multiple choice questions?

Robert: Gravity Forms on WordPress.

Andrew: That’s just Gravity Forms, where as soon as I click it, it automatically goes to the next page?

Robert: I’ve got a good a developer, Andrew.

Andrew: You really do. I love Gravity Forms. I use it all the time. I just didn’t realize that you can do it so that as soon as people click . . . oh, that is beautiful. I would pay just to learn how to do that. All right. Never mind. This has been great to have you up on the site. I’m so glad to have you teach this. I’m looking forward to hearing people use it, and frankly, I’m looking forward to using this myself because I know how powerful webinars still are. Are they still hot, or is it one thing that people have overdone?

Robert: In the internet marketing space they’re a bit harder to fill up. I’m running one in a couple of hours. I still work quite well for my audience, but in the internet marketing space it is harder to get these massive, massive numbers because think of what a market’s have kind of screwed it up. But in other audiences, these guys have never, for the business webinar, a lot of people never heard what a webinar was at the time, because it’s some industries don’t even know what a webinar is, so there’s this [inaudible 00:44:11] for it’s Greenfields, and sadly now industry is being slammed. But you can still do them and do quite well.

Andrew: I feel like in the internet marketing space everything gets slammed like that.

Robert: Marketers ruin everything.

Andrew: No, they help get people to come buy products which means that they fuel businesses. All right. But this is still effective outside of the internet marketing space. I’m curious to see how it works for people in our audience and I like the way you think in general. A lot of these ideas apply for marketing outside of webinars, like finding people’s pain points, buying ads based on them, and etc. A lot of this applies outside.

I’m so proud to have you on here. The website of course is FeedAStarvingCrowd.com. Robert, thanks for being on Mixergy again.

Robert: Thanks, Andrew.

Robert: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.

Andrew: This program is about how to develop a message that converts, and actually it’s going to be taught by Joanna Wiebe, founder of, hey Joanna, founder of this website right here, Copyhackers.com which publishes copywriting guides that are made exclusively to improve your sales. I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy where proven founders teach and I’m going to help to facilitate this session with Joanna. And one of the things that you guys who are watching us are going to see in this session is why, let me show you, why this page right here. If you’ve got us in the background bring us to the foreground right now so you can see why this page right here didn’t do as well as this page. They look very similar but there’s a difference. You’re going to find out what the difference is, how you can achieve such a dramatic difference, if not in design then in numbers. Joanna, what exactly is the conversion rate, the lift difference between this before and this after?Joanna: Well, the lift is a 26.35% lift. It went from about 2 and a half percent conversion rate to a little over 3.Andrew: And as a result of that how many beds does this addiction center have empty?Joanna: Zero.

Andrew: Zero

Joanna: None. Waiting lists.

Andrew: And we’re talking about big numbers for them. Everytime they get a new client in how much is it worth to them?

Joanna: Approximately $20,000 and that’s just for the first 30 days. So an 18 or a 6 month stay is obviously worth a lot more.

Andrew: Alright. And if you guys watch nothing else make sure to pay attention to that because I think you’ll find it extremely clever the way that she figured out how to change the pages. And here’s what we’re going to be talking about today, right up on the big board, and we’re going to start off with the very first tactic which is, to replace friction words and to add click triggers and, Joanna let me bring up an example right here of a page. In fact not even of a page. Where is that? Of a button here. What are we looking at here on this button?

Joanna: We are looking at the winning button in a split test that I ran for a client of time. The winning button, the original button, the control was, it read schedule my auction. And the winning button, the treatment B which is this, has a second line that prepares people for what’s next. And this won by, the lift off this one was about 47% lift, the number of people who clicked through to complete the form.

Andrew: That means 40% people more completed a form just because that one line underneath.

Joanna: Yes, exactly, yeah, yeah. And this is worth a lot to the business too in getting people to sign up for the way that they make their money, yeah.

Andrew: And that’s because that’s a click trigger. What exactly does a click trigger mean?

Joanna: Well, a click trigger, the way that I think about getting people to convert is that you have to get them over a wall. This wall as I see it is built of bricks. And with our copy we’re trying to knock down a lot of those bricks to get the wall smaller and get the person over to the other side, the paying side, turn them from visitor to customer. But you can’t always break down the whole wall. So sometimes we have to do little things at the point of need, the ultimate point of need which is really here. When you’re at a button that’s the ultimate time to really pull out al the stops to get people to click that button. So a click trigger is a thing that triggers the click, that gets the person over that wall. It’s generally smaller things that might not be related to an objection, like a key objection about your product or service or your company itself. But rather smaller things like what I call, like what I call, well I call them reasons to believe. They’re the bonuses, like 24/7 free support or support by e-mail and chat or support by phone. I mean those are three different ways to message support. One of those could work as a click trigger for you. Or, you know, there’s also free shipping, free two way shipping. A lot of other things that come in that are really just about positioning the right small message to bump people to get them to click that, that button. Push them further.

Andrew: Here’s another example right here. From one of your clients. It is that text that’s right to the left of the button that says, Amex saved us $100,000.

Joanna: Yeah, so that’s a great example of a click trigger. And this, the entire screen that we’re looking at right now is, it actually acts as the click trigger which may seem a little crazy because there’s so much going on. But what led into this, what got these two bars to show on the screen and this message, ‘Others like you save 27.3 percent.’ This is all intended to get people to click. It’s not intended to do much else. It’s an intriguing message to get. ‘I could save 27.3 percent,’ but the reason it’s near the button is to compel people to do this thing to get that 27.3 percent. That along with the testimonial from [??] about how much he saved. Those are two strong click triggers that it would be hard to imagine someone not, at least, clicking to get started versus not having any of those click triggers around.

Andrew: If we’re looking to create our own click triggers, what do we think about to come up with phrases like ‘Next an EMX Rep will contact you,’ or to come up with a quote and the image that we saw a moment ago.

Joanna: There’s two parts there. There’s these reasons to believe that I recommend you go through. So much of it is sitting down by yourself, or listening to what people are telling you about your product and what’s so cool about it. Not the product itself, but the way that it’s delivered. Get out a piece of paper, a traditional piece of paper and write down things like free shipping that you offer, or if you don’t offer free shipping because you have a downloadable product, say ‘Instant downloads.’ Write these obvious things that you know you might see on other sites but you may fail to do them on your own sites. If you list them all out and then try to strategically position them at the right button, you might have multiple calls to action. Not everyone of them will need a click trigger but the really important ones, like plans and pricing, whatever will get them to go sign up, those could benefit from click triggers. The second part that you mentioned was around this ‘Next an EMX rep will contact you.’ That’s about setting those expectations for what’s going to happen afterwards, which is overlooked, but everybody who completes something wants to know, ‘Is this done? What happens now,’ if it’s not clear what happens next.

Andrew: If I tell people what’s going to happen after they click a button, there’s a good chance that they’ll be more likely to click it? That’s what I should be testing?

Joanna: Yes. The hypothesis there would be if you show that, more people will click because those expectations are set. We might also see that what happens next isn’t desirable. You have to make sure that as long as it’s matching what they expect and somewhat desirable, then put it there. If it’s going to be, ‘We’ll double charge your credit card accidentally,’ then you don’t want to put that in the button. I’m just kidding. You know what I mean? Only desirable things should go in that button.

Andrew: Next, ‘Salesmen will call you everyday until we get you to finally buy from us.’ That’s not a good thing [??] put on a button. That’s what a click trigger is and that’s what we want to add. You said replace friction words with click triggers. What’s a friction word that we want to eliminate?

Joanna: Anything that causes friction is something that, obviously, want to minimize. Friction can be usability things like using the word ‘create’ in that example you showed of that button, the second button, the ‘Get Started then Create Free Account’ below it. Get started was intentionally put there as the lead message with ‘Create Free Account’ below it. People are actually going to be creating a free account in the next step but they don’t want to create a free account. They just want to get started. It’s a matter of taking those friction words, like ‘create,’ ‘sign up’ can be friction if it feels like it’s going to be a lot of work. Other things like ‘Pay Now,’ it’s a friction word. Instead say the things that will make it easy, that they want, like ‘Get.’

Andrew: Anything else here before we go to the next big idea?

Joanna: No.

Andrew: Let’s go to the next big tactic which is, ‘Get your message from your customer.’ This is where what we talked about earlier comes into play. Let’s talk real quick about what was going on in this before, what was going on in this after and then the more important part is, how you got the after. What’s the difference? What’s going on in before? What’s going on in the after?

Joanna: The before is a message that’s really similar to what you might see if you were to go, for some reason, and scour a bunch of different rehab center websites. You’ll probably wind up reading a lot of softer messages like this, ‘You’re addiction ends here.’ It’s a nice, soft message. It’s not saying anything. It’s not that compelling. It’s not saying, ‘Do something to end your addiction today.’ It’s just saying passively, ‘It ends here.’ That’s a lot of the messaging that you’ll see across [??] sites. This soft, ‘The right place to recover.’ ‘Help you enter your recovery journey.’ ‘Private center located in beautiful south Florida.’ That’s nice, but it ends up being really soft. And so my hypothesis was well everybody in this rehab center space is saying the same thing. Either they’re all right and they’re all getting it totally right or someone started with a best practice that is now a bad practice. My hypothesis was that people need in this particular situation where they’re looking for treatment for an alcohol or drug addiction, they probably don’t need to have their heads patted right now. Probably and that’s where I had to go out and find out, and I didn’t know that myself until I actually went and did some research to get to a point where I could feel confident that this soft messaging might not be the way to go. It’s not how these people actually talk.

Andrew: Before you get to how these people actually talk I want to say something that you told me before you started which was, you know a lot of us when we’re starting to create our own messaging we look to see what others in our space are doing. I know I did. I didn’t know how to do anything. I just would go on to a few people who I respected I’d say, oh that’s how they express that, I’ll do something similar and I’ll build from there. And you’re saying that’s what happens and that’s how you end up, that’s what often happens which is fine, but that’s how you end up with this message that sounds just like everyone else’s and really doesn’t say much. You wanted to speak the language of the customer. How did you do that?

Joanna: Yeah, well I mean I did do what you’re saying, right? I do think that it’s good to go swipe from other people when they have really good messages. So going out and doing that content audit is really valuable. Just don’t stop at the content audit. Learn what others are doing and now let’s go see what customers are really, or prospects are really saying. So what I did was I went to Amazon.com. This is a really good trick that, you know one of many tricks that copywriters have up our sleeve. But to go find that message I went to Amazon.com, looked at the book reviews for six books on drug addiction, alcohol addiction and the rehab process or getting through it whether you’re, you know, for family or etcetera. But you’re mining all these reviews for the really interesting messages that stand out that are a little different. And for generally how people speak about the recovery process and their expectations going into it and what came out of it. And these are things that you could find in a lot of other ways too. If you were to do an interview, in this particular case when we’re talking about addicts going through rehab, it’s hard to get them, hard to do the typical phone interviews or to go through the normal surveys and things like that. And to really understand what was happening. So when I mined all of these reviews on Amazon.com, pretty straight forward, pretty easy, I came up with this long list of interesting messages, repeated messages, analogies.

Andrew: What are some of the ones that are repeated and is there one that you can remember now and point out here?

Joanna: Well yeah the one here that is absolutely, it stood out as a clear, frank message, from a reviewer who was very clear and frank and so it’s not too surprising. And it is of course the headline, If You Think You Need Rehab, You Do. And this was a former addict actually saying that in a book review. It was the core, when I found that message I just kept going back to it. And others had said things like it, so it started to feel like a message that was coming through but it was his exact wording that, I assume it was a he, that came through so clearly and just begged to be tested as a lead message.

Andrew: I see. And that’s how you ended up getting your headline. Instead of trying to think of what’s a good way to explain this or how do I persuade people you said, how are they talking about this right now.

Joanna: Yes, yeah. I don’t think, I think that the best conversion copywriters will say to you, the message doesn’t come from me, it will never come from me, don’t hire me because I know a lot about it. Hire me because I know where to go to find the right message, yeah.

Andrew: All right. 26% lift just on those tests and of course you did other tests and got different, got even higher results. You actually wouldn’t let me include that number here because you said, Andrew if I don’t feel strong enough about the test I’m not going to let you use the number even though it sounds dramatic and powerful.

Joanna: I know, and it’s a really good number too.

Andrew: Alright, but we feel solid about the 26%. And more then the number I like methodology because it’s one that we can all use. And if it’s not just Amazon reviews maybe it’s reviews on other sites, maybe it’s in comments, but you’re saying, mind the way your customers are talking about your product.

Joanna: Exactly. And there are reviews out there for everything. And it might seem like kind of silly to go look at book reviews when you’re a rehab center. But they’re, I mean you could go look at rehab center reviews but those are a lot harder to find. When the point is really trying to understand what the addict is going through in this case. And that could be the case for other, I mean I do this for like all my clients. Really go out and see what people are saying on Amazon.com. It’s a really good source of information.

Andrew: All right, back to the big board. Now our next big tactic is to experience your product and record it if possible, even if you think you already know what your product is. In this case we’re not going to show the customer that we were talking about, the person who wanted to work with you, but we are going to show this website here, Camtasia. Why? How does this factor into what you’d like us to do and then we’ll get into what you learned when you did this.

Joanna: Camtasia is screen recording software, and it’s what I use when I’m going through, for any new client that I have. I go through the first use experience and record it so I can capture exactly what it’s like and what I was thinking as I was using it. It’s like usertesting.com, but you’re doing it for yourself without acting like an average user but really assessing the whole experience when you first start, when you first consider using a solution, when you go through the sign up, when you actually start using it, if it’s software. When you do use it the first few times online, it’s something I recommend, that my clients and my readers do the same thing too, is try to step back and experience your site and your software for the first time and record it so you can play it back. If you try to take notes, everybody knows it’s time consuming. It stops you as you’re thinking.

Andrew: You’re saying just turn on Camtasia, any program to record your screen, Screenflow, Quicktime now has it built it. Whatever it is, record yourself going to your website, clicking around until you find the product you want to buy. Buy that product. Go through to the end. Watch it back on Camtasia, in fact, don’t even stop there. You would even have us take a video camera after the web part is over.

Joanna: That’s where it really comes in, when it’s a product that’s a hard good that gets delivered to your doorstep. Record all of that. Record what it’s like if you get a little post it note in the mailbox that says, ‘Come down to the post office to pick up your package.’ What did that feel like? Really be real about it because that’s what your customer’s going to be going through and that’s going to be important. They’re wondering that too. If it comes to your doorstep, that’s a great thing and that’s a message in itself. ‘It’ll be delivered to your doorstep.’ Record what it’s like when you get it and that’s exactly what I did in this one case with this gentleman and his brain enhancing pills. I think the point was they’re supposed to make you smarter. I didn’t take the pills but I did record the experience of those pills, that he wanted me to write a sales page for, arriving at my door step. Came to the door step. Then I took photos of what the pills looked like. Not the capsules themselves, but the box that I dispense. As a customer you would spend $50 to get one of these boxes. That’s a fair chunk of change for 24 pills. What is the experience like when you first get it? Clearly, Apple has thought through this. Any Apple product that you get, you’re blown away by that opening the product up experience. That’s a big part of the brand. That’s always going to be true for any startup, any business with a hard good that gets delivered. That was the case here. These pill boxes were crushed. The pills were intact, but it was a really bad experience and I recommended that he improve it and spend a little more on shipping.

Andrew: He didn’t want to work with you because you were asking him to improve the product? Let’s suppose he said, ‘Sure,’ and made it into a nice experience that as soon as a package came in, you opened it. It looked beautiful. This session is about, going back to the main idea here, ‘Develop a message that converts.’ You fixed the flow. You have a photo of it. What would you suggest to him that he do if it worked to increase his conversions?

Joanna: All of these questions that we put off answering, real questions. A real question people have for a hard good is, ‘Do I have to go to the mailbox to pick it up? Do I have to get in my car and go get it? Is it going to come to my door?’ If it comes to your door and you can actually say, ‘It’s going to arrive there and be fully in tact.’ This is what Hair Club for Men was using for their packaging for years. ‘It’s going to come in the brown package and you don’t have to worry about it,’ because that’s real objection. Nobody wants to be embarrassed in that situation. In this case, I want to know, ‘Do I have to drive to the post office?’ It seems so silly, but if I know that I don’t have to go to the post office, message that to me. Say it will arrive at my doorstep and voila, ‘It’s going to look like this. We guarantee it will be
[??].’

Andrew: Even show a photo of what it’s going to look like when it arrives at the door. If you were doing a long sales letter especially, you told me that’s what you might do.

Joanna: That was the case here, that’s why I really cared about that [??] experience because he wanted me to do a long form sales page for him and long form sales pages are amazing for letting you cut through every single objection there is, including putting a photo in there. If that experience had been great, that’s another compelling reason that you put in the sales page and it gets people to click.

Andrew: Let’s go back to the big board here and look at the next big idea which is, want to reflect on what people are expecting. What they already know about you, what’s their motivation, take a step back and do it and when this company did it, what did they see? What did they see when you got them to look at this screen, their homepage.

Joanna: It came back for them. It became very clear that this is the website for service that lets you accept payments online by sending around a URL with the dollar amount in the URL that’s owed to you. A really simple service. Great, simple. It’s true, but nowhere on the site, on the homepage by looking at the screen right off the bat can you see what this actually is. InspirePay [SP], options people.

Andrew: [??] can tell them what it is. If you guys are watching this, of course, we have it in the background, that’s fine. Bring it to the foreground now. If you’re listening to this program on an mp3 player, you’ll understand in a moment what we’re looking at but if you can bring it up, I’m talking so you have time to bring it up, look at this and see for yourself. Can you tell what this is just by looking at that? I know I couldn’t when I first saw it. Joanna, what is this? As they reflected, we’ll see what they were able to do after [??].

Joanna: It’s a really easy way for consultants and freelancers to accept payments. Those people in particular, but anybody, to accept payments online. It’s a very simple solution but it’s a payment solution, which, of course, isn’t exactly coming through here.

Andrew: Then they did this as a result of the process that you just talked about. Now, bring it up to the front if you’re listening in the background. What does this do?

Joanna: This was a new headline. We did a before and after, this wasn’t a true split test, this is a before and after. We went from three percent conversion rate on the first version of the site to 8.6 on this, with the headline change and a bit more [??] that made it clear what this was about. It’s really just reflecting what people expect when they come to the page. Then we moved beyond that and built it into a bit more of a value proposition but you can look at that headline and understand that it’s how you accept payments with any payment provider for anything, from anyone. All these other [??]. Ultimately we know now what it is and that’s you have to reflect [??] your headline. Your headline does so much work because it’s taking off a lot of boxes [SP], including reflecting that motivation, what they came here for, what do they want to get from you, why did they arrive here today. Say it in the headline however you can, as best you can, as clearly as you can and you could see the same results that InspirePay [??], which is a great company, by the way. They knew that their site wasn’t converting that well.

Andrew: You know what, 8.6, by the way, really impressive on this site especially considering the kind of product that they are. I wouldn’t have guessed. Maybe I would have guessed. The thing is, my eye keeps going back to this. I’ve got my notes in front of me and my eye keeps going back to this and this looks really beautiful. This looks, even though it didn’t do well, it looks beautiful. This one that did do well looks just OK in comparison and that’s what I always have to remember that beautiful doesn’t always beat out OK.

Joanna: It depends. If you’re a company that’s really well known, where your brand is ubiquitous, nobody questions it, everybody knows. That’s not the case for most startups. Most startups have to have their copy lead rather than design lead because the messaging is important. It’s a big gamble to depend on the design to be so beautiful that people will want to stay to learn versus just putting it out there clearly. The rest of the page does look nicer as you get into it, but you’re right that the large focus is on copy and the results speak for themselves.

Andrew: Before we go to the next big point, let’s take a look at your website and see if you do that. There it is. ‘The only web copywriting guides made exclusively to improve your sales.’ We know it’s copyrighting guides to improve your sales. I know you offer other services, by the way. Why didn’t you say, ‘The only web copywriting guides and services that are made to improve your sales.’ Why did you decide to focus just on copywriting guides?

Joanna: That’s a really good question. The services are a bit of a secondary solution here. I’m of the opinion that you can, if you read the right stuff and give yourself some time to work on your own copy, you can write your own copy if you read these books. I believe that, so I’m not just pitching, but read these then go and do it yourself. That’s where the copy hackers will always be focused most on the e-books that we offer and the courses and things that go with that. The services are secondary to that. That’s by design, not wanting to talk about services on the homepage.

Andrew: By the way, I interview a lot of entrepreneurs and sometimes it’s so hard. I understand what they do because I have researchers who’ve filled me in on what each guest does, but I don’t often know how to explain to my audience what the entrepreneur’s company does. When I come to a site like this where you tell me right here, all I do is then swipe it and this is what I use to explain to my audience what you do. This is what I use to explain internally what you do, when we talk about you. It’s so helpful to have this concrete description of what the company does and what the product does and that’s the way you get to it, by taking a step back and, even if you start off with something that looks like this, take a step back. Someone who’s never seen me before understand what we do, would they understand how we do it if they don’t keep working until you get to this? I’m glad that it worked out. I was going to go to your screen and see what came up.

Joanna: I was sweating a bit there.

Andrew: I did that, too, as I read your books. I kept thinking, ‘Does she do this?’ Then I said, ‘You hypocrite. Stop asking does she do it. Are you doing it?’

Joanna: I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot of opportunity to improve on my site. Absolutely. I know that people are constricted or constrained by themes. A lot of us are building our site on WordPress themes, and some buttons will always say, ‘Add to cart,’ and you can’t change these dynamic ones. My site does that and it bothers me every time I look at it, but until I change to a different way of doing the site, I understand that there’s some things that you won’t always take all the boxes but keep optimizing. Keep trying.

Andrew: As someone who’s curious, I try to learn and use as much as possible and there was a time when I said, ‘I have to use everything. If I don’t use everything, then I’m a failure.’ I found myself doing absolutely nothing because I was worried that I would miss something and someone would catch it and consider me a failure. Then I was immobilized. I understand completely what you’re talking about, especially when you talk about WordPress issues like that. It’s so liberating and so constraining at the same time. On to the big board here. Next big idea is, ‘Don’t write for 100 percent of your visitors. Write instead for the 20 percent who are most likely to convert.’ We have an example which I’ll bring up on the screen. Here’s a company that we’re going to single out because we’re going to show the after screenshot in a moment. They were doing what here? That you’re telling us not to do. How are they doing that?

Joanna: They weren’t saying who it’s for and this is a really clear example of that, ‘Simply just say who it’s for.’ Say this is right for [??]. They knew who it was right for as a company, and they know who it’s right for as a company, but you wouldn’t know that to look on the site. A big part of not only reducing your [??] bounce, but helping to increase your conversion rate is to let people know that they’ve arrived at the right place and that this is a good fit for them. It’s not always happening here. They were attracting a lot of gamers to the sites for their [??] service, but their service, they knew internally, wasn’t ideal for gamers. It wasn’t the right solution for them. They were a better fit for people with more professional, who need VPN for professional purposes. A good example was a journalist in China who doesn’t want to be followed around, have their internet usage followed or tracked in any way, this is a good solution for them. You would never know that on the site. It’s a really clear straightforward example of who it’s right for and the use case, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the site.

Andrew: Here’s what you recommend instead. This. Specifically, you’re being so specific about the 20 percent that you’re targeting. Right here. I’m going to zoom in. There we go. You’re going to have a section right there that says specifically, ‘It is ideally for foreign journalists, researchers and investigators,’ and you’ll have three other related people who you’re targeting, but it’s not for everyone. Even if you’re a gamer who might be turned off to this, you’re OK with that? Because it’s not right for [??].

Joanna: I did actually make a small recommendation there to say who it’s not ideal for, which some of the people are open to doing too. It makes sense. In this case, it wasn’t ideal for the client to go forward with who it’s not ideal for but rather to, I don’t recommend implying a lot of the time, rather I’d recommend stating. We are implying who it’s not right for and saying who it is right for. Nonetheless, we were still very specific and I would recommend these other missing points here that are TBD. These are specific. This is something that, if I’m a foreign journalist, or a researcher, an investigator, I can arrive on this site, look at it. ‘Yes, everything else matches but is it right for me?’ Then there you go. Right there it says, ‘It’s right for me.’

Andrew: What about the gamers? If you’re building a business and gamers want to sign up, shouldn’t you let them sign up? Maybe give them a seven day period to try it out and then leave if they’re not happy?

Joanna: That’s where the ideal for statement is better than just doing a not ideal for because, an ideal for statement will rarely turn people off. It will generally help the people that you really want to convert, that 20 to 35 percent that I talk about. Those people that you really want to convert are more likely to convert. The others are not necessarily going to leave because you didn’t mention gamers in there. Those who consider themselves close to, or as similar to the types of people in that ideal for statement are also more likely to stick around too. We did this [??] with Quickbooks. You would say ideal for Quickbooks Simple Start is ideal for freelancers. It didn’t mean that if I don’t consider myself a freelancer I’m not going to use it, but if I can relate to what the experience is of a freelancer and that’s the same thing here. You’re not necessarily excluding anybody by not including them.

Andrew: Earlier we talked about how you get the right language by checking out review sites like Amazon, in the example you gave earlier. When you were working at Intuit, you guys would go way further than that to learn how people talk about your products. Can you tell the audience what’d you do when you worked with them?

Joanna: We would do a follow me home. Follow me home, FMH, is where you find a customer in Staples, or wherever it might be, and intrude on them and demand to follow them home. It might not even be that. It can also be for new users of Quickbooks Online, they sign up, you email and say, ‘Can I come to your house and watch you use this?’ You go to their house and watch them use it. Back when we were talking about first use experience that you want to record, that’s one of those and you get loads of data out of there. All sorts of messages that are dying to be used on your sites. Again, you don’t have to write those messages now, they just wrote them for you.

Andrew: I always heard of Intuit doing this to understand what features to include in their products, which ones to leave out or hide. How to simplify the product, but you’re saying you would also use it to create the message. See how people are talking about this and that’s how you create the message.

Joanna: It’s really closely tied. I think in a lot of cases copywriting is more closely tied to the product development side of things and the product than it is to marketing. That’s a really good example. It feeds into both sides, but there’s a lot of overlap there with building a product. Side note.

Andrew: That point of going after 20 percent, not 100 percent of your audience. I read that in one of your books. Which of the books is it in?

Joanna: In book one, “Where Stellar Messages Come From.”

Andrew: Where Stellar Messages Come From.” I actually bought all five books, but I think I bought them twice. I bought them when they were on [??] site and then when I knew that you were coming on here I said, ‘I should have them available in case I need to bring them up on the screen.’ So I bought them [??]. I’m really happy with them.

Joanna: I’ll go refund that for you.

Andrew: No. Do not. We’re going to give away and people will see at the end how, even though I paid for it, you’re going to give the book that we just talked about, book one, to the audience?

Joanna: Yes.

Andrew: We’ll talk about that later on towards the end of the program. Of course, we’ll link to it. Let’s go back to the big board. ‘Make it immediately clear.’ You’re saying, ‘Answer who you are and what this product is on your homepage.’ Here’s an example of a company, here’s a before. We do a lot of before and afters in this session. Here’s a before. I love that about this space. That we’re all willing to share our before and after photos. Only in the tech world and health world are people so open with their before and after. This is before. What’s going on here that’s the anti-example of what you’re suggesting that we do, which is make it clear?

Joanna: Making it immediately clear. We can read through this and eventually understand what this is about. What the service fee [??] is all about. Right now it’s not clear. I know there’s something to do with CMS because I can read, ‘Say goodbye to your CMS. Hello [??].’ This is a bit on the too clever side, which is definitely what I recommend against a lot of the time. All the time, frankly. ‘Say goodbye to your CMS, hello Feed.Us. OK. It’s something about CMS. Now I know that I have to look to learn more about it and thus the work begins …

Andrew: What is it about saying goodbye to my CMS?

Joanna: Yeah.

Andrew: What am I replacing it with? CMS, of course, Content Management System, which anyone who will be a good fit for them would understand what CMS is. That’s not a problem. They would know it’s like a WordPress or a Drupal, but this is still not clear. We don’t know what they do and how they solve our problems, so we don’t know if they’re the right fit for us. I’m stalling because I’m looking for the after shot. Here is the after shot. There it is. I’ll zoom just a little bit so that people can see it. Now, what does it say for people who are just listening and not watching and how’s this better?

Joanna: Well, now we’ve gone from saying goodbye to your CMS, I think it was, to a new headline that reads out of CMS to a site that’s already built. The value of Feed.Us as a service is that you can add CMS to a site that’s already built. That is what it does best. That’s what it’s there to do that others don’t do. Thus, the birth of this very clear headline. That is what it does and there’s high value in that. We get into, of course, the value message further along, what the benefits are there. We also introduce that with preheader texts, you know what they call it. Now designers, agencies, freelancers and developers can add a CMS to a site that’s already built. Those two parts work together and then the intro part is, of course, that ideal force statement that I talked about before. Yeah, that’s where we’re going and making it really clear what this does and then again, who it does it for. Designers, agencies, freelancers and developers.

Andrew: This is a mockup where you’re just showing what the page will look like. I didn’t grab this off of the site.

Joanna: No. If they go to the site now, Rick over at Feed.Us, he has already made it live. I believe that this is a close approximation. I think this might be the full screenshot. I know he sent me a screenshot, but over on Feed.Us, they’ve just switched their site over to reflect. This is a representation of the wire [??] that I produced for them.

Andrew: OK. Right. On the actual site itself there is a button that says get started now. The reason I said that is I’m looking at this and I don’t see how I would get started with them.

Joanna: There’s no call to action. Yeah. I make a lot of recommendations and sometimes people choose not to take certain recommendations. This one clearly, they’re talking a lot about the movie and the hero section. My recommendation was different from that, but this is just about the headline. [??]

Andrew: Yeah. Right. The key idea is out of CMS to a site that’s already built. You have a static site that’s already built, your client does. They want an easier way to add content to it. They want an easier way to keep updating the site and now they understand this is their solution.

Joanna: Yes.

Andrew: OK. You want it to just keep being immediately clear to people what you’re about. I had that issue, too, with Mixergy where I used to say . . . look at what I caught you with.

Joanna: Chopstick time.

Andrew: Chopstick. Did she know I was about to come to her? Good. My site used to say, and I don’t know why it took me so long to recognize this makes no sense, Mixergy, where upstarts mix. Now, what does that even mean? You would think that it was a social network site for them to mix.

Joanna: Yeah.

Andrew: It just made absolutely no sense. I could see that the conversions were going nowhere with that. Then I changed it to interviews and courses with proven entrepreneurs. Really explicit that this is an interview site where you can get courses, too.

Joanna: Yeah.

Andrew: Boom, suddenly you can see. Actually, I have a graph that shows exactly at that moment where I made that change, boom. Numbers started to go up and people understood what we’re about.

Joanna: Yeah. Copy optimization.

Andrew: In my head it made sense at the time, where ambitious upstarts mix or where upstarts mix, I forgot.

Joanna: Yeah. I can see. I mean, I definitely have a lot of clients who go there. It’s that’s like that tagline idea, where everybody thinks that great messaging, a really good headline should sound like a tagline or something. That’s not really descriptive in any way. That’s great that you optimized it to the point that you have, though. Nice work.

Andrew: We have a good example of that, actually coming up right now. Back onto the big board.

Joanna: Nice segue.

Andrew: Tell them what’s in it for them with sticky benefits. Be real and specific. Move away from summary statements. We have a bunch of examples here. Let me show and then the audience can see for themselves what this is an example of. I’m going to zoom in on these examples. There is one from Offers.com before it was Jewelry.com. Intuit Money Manager. Microsoft. This is a random site, Lessert, there it is. Anyone who’s seen this now will spot, Joanna, what? What is it that’s similar about all of these?

Joanna: Save time and money. The ultimate summary. Not like the season, but as in a summary of a statement. Save time and money is possibly the most overused message out there. Everybody wants to say it. Everybody summarizes everything down to save time and money because they are two ultimate benefits. Unfortunately everybody’s saying it and it’s not specific, either. Even if everybody wasn’t saying it, it’s still not specific. My least favorite message of all time. Save time and money.

Andrew: When people see this over and over again, they just don’t notice it anymore.

Joanna: No.

Andrew: You’re telling us be real, be specific. If we looked at our website right now and saw, it says save time and money, what we would do to make it more specific so that people actually pay attention to it and if they pay attention to it, they’re more likely to be persuaded by it? What do we do with that save time and money?

Joanna: Well first, choose either save time or save money because people value either saving time or saving money, one over the other. Know your audience. Know what they value first and foremost. Secondly, let’s get specific. If we choose that it’s going to be time save money, money’s the most important. OK. Back to the jewelry.com example, save as much as 30% on jewelry from stores that you trust.

Andrew: I see.

Joanna: Even more specific, on what type of jewelry? On high quality jewelry? On designer jewelry?

Andrew: On wedding rings, whatever.

Joanna: [??] getting into those specifics.

Andrew: As specific as we can get it, right down to save 30%, save 28% at local stores.

Joanna: Yes.

Andrew: That, people pay attention to?

Joanna: Much more than the summary. That, you can sink your teeth into. That, you walk away and you know that you can save 28%. That’s a number that sticks out. I mean, this other stuff, people will say that copy should sing or write copy that sings. I don’t ever want to write copy that sings because song lyrics are just flowy. Nothing stops on them. There’s no sandpaper gripping moment where you feel kind of uncomfortable by the message or you have to pay attention to it. We want people to pay attention to our words. Save time and money, there’s just nothing really compelling about any of those. Save 68 minutes a week is compelling. Save 38% on a single purchase is compelling and memorable. It’s all sticky.

Andrew: All right. If it’s not save time and money, what are other summary statements that people make on their sites that they need to stop and make more specific?

Joanna: Yeah. That could be something like painless blank or pain-free blank. Pain-free vendor management software. Period. Right? It’s not really saying anything. It’s stating something. It’s stating that this is about vendor management software, so kudos for getting specific there, I guess, but it’s too summarized. It’s really trying to not say anything at the risk of possibly offending something or saying the wrong thing. There’s a lot of safety in summarizing. There’s a lot of throwing yourself out there and uncertainty when you do something uncomfortable like get specific and make a real claim or a real promise, but those are way more compelling.

Andrew: If we have one of these summary statements, very broad, non-specific, you want us to look and see if we can find if this summary is based on anything specific. If it is, can we quantify it? If we quantify it, then people will pay attention to it. They might at least wonder how did they get to 28%. What is it that is making this 28% cheaper than what I’m used to?

Joanna: Yeah. At least in that case, that 28% is doing some work. It’s earning its space on the page. I think every word you have on the page has a quota to fulfill and they have a certain amount of work that they have to do. It’s 28% will more likely stick versus the word time or the word money, which are not really doing any work in that space. If they’re not getting noticed, then they have to go. They have to be replaced.

Andrew: All right. Back to the big board here. This next one’s pretty simple. Use logos and testimonials and social proof to establish trust. Here’s a good example of a company that’s doing it. Which company is this that you gave me a screenshot for?

Joanna: Yeah. This is Thank Thank Notes. They do thank you notes for start-ups. They do this and they don’t go overboard with the number of social proof points that they’re using here. I’ve come across a lot of sites, unfortunately, that say a certain I think some people, that say, oh people have used services like us. And I know that’s been promoted among people and so be it. But I would always recommend going, like actually putting down real people that should have actually featured you. Just for that credibility proofing. If it’s social proof it has to be proof then, right? That’s the key part. It’s not just social, but.

Andrew: Okay, what do you mean that some people actually will copy and paste logos that they haven’t earned?

Joanna: Yeah, right, like I’ve actually had a lot of people write and say that it’s cool to just, well because people use services like theirs. So people have, Tech Crunch has written about financial management software. So here, as, without even saying as featured in, right? They’re not explicitly lying, they’re just putting the logo there. I don’t recommend that people do that. At all.

Andrew: Yeah, actually I have seen that. Software like this has been used by companies like these, or, if we’re selling conversion software it might be conversion softwares, or these companies believe in conversion software or conversion optimization.

Joanna: Right. In which case then I could say, because every site uses copywriting, that every site out there Mixergy, you’re now a client of mine, and who else, who else do I want? Disney, I’m also now, right, because every one of these sites actually uses and believes in copy, so, that’s just the point right. Let’s just keep that social proof real so it actually feels real and like it’s going to support your message rather then make people question your credibility.

Andrew: Here it is on their site. Handwritten thank you notes they will send out for you.

Joanna: This is their old site. They’re redoing it right now.

Andrew: Okay. Do you work with them?

Joanna: Yeah, yup.

Andrew: Okay. Wow, so they actually will send out a thank you note to my customers?

Joanna: Yes, a handwritten thank you note. They have this like extremely cool robot. It’s some, I at first thought that they had like a bunch of people sitting around a table and I was like, ah, everybody’s hands are going to get cramped up.

Andrew: That’s what I thought.

Joanna: I know. But they have this and it’s actually a pretty cool system that they’re going to be. I recommend that they talk about it more open on their site going forward, talk more about this robot that they use and actually you know name the robot and make it a real part. Because this thing is actually producing extremely realistic thank you notes which is better then you know just printing off some random.

Andrew: And then they have an API. So software developers have told me that they hooked in with their API so as soon as they get an order it automatically goes to thanknotes.com. By the way, this may be real these logos, but this guy I’ve seen forever on.

Joanna: I know

Andrew: On whatchacallit sites.

Joanna: I know.

Andrew: On stock photography sites.

Joanna: I know, he’s the same as that girl sitting at her computer in the suit who like raises her hands over her head at the laptop. She’s everywhere. I’m always like, let me get the stock photos.

Andrew: And this theme I think came to them from Woo Themes, you page source, let me see. Optimize. Yeah, I think I even own this theme from Woo Themes. A really simple site, they’re redoing it. The, but it’s impressive. I can see how it would convert and this adds a lot of trust that it’s been featured on these sites.

Joanna: Right.

Andrew: I’m laughing at them or poking fun because of the stock photography here. But I’ve heard really good things about them from companies that use them to send out thank you notes directly to their customers.

Joanna: Yeah, yeah, they’re really good people too there.

Andrew: All right. Finally, invest in a visual designer. And you have an example of, well a client that we talked about earlier, bring them up. This is a before, this is the after. Beyond just getting a nice design, what’s going on here?

Joanna: Yeah, well so what we’ve done here is on the previous site. I mean Energymarkexchange/emax is what they’re really known as. They have a lot of services. They’re an energy brokerage. They help you get the lowest, you know help businesses and towns get a reduced rate on their electricity. But they had a bunch of different services. We decided with the new one as the business to focus instead on their one key service. It was just brand new, it was just coming out. They’d done a few of them, right, but nonetheless it was this reverse auction service. And so that was the focus of the new site. Let’s just streamline it, let’s just push all the other stuff aside and focus instead on the reverse auction service. And then talk about the value of that service and make sure that it’s done in a design that’s actually credible and trustworthy and engaging. And so that’s what we arrived at here. The headline, as you can see, has been treated differently than the others have. Again and again, in my copywriting, I focus a lot of headlines and buttons and it’s for a reason. I can make it a big difference to help people understand with just your last energy bill, we can save you as much as 30%. So that’s good to know, but now how? Oh, in reverse action, energy suppliers, but in real time to serve you, giving you the lowest price blah, blah, blah. But, we went from this other site that was trying to sell a lot of things without really talking about anything, or really expressing the value of any one thing. Cut all that crap out, focus on your one. People can do this with a product, too. If you have a best product to lead with, your number one solution. Lead with it, help people understand it, and then they’ll always find another solution, you can help them, if that’s not right for them. They can always go out and find something else on your site that’s a better match for them. But, lead with your most popular product. The reverse auctions are their absolute best product, for Emax.

Andrew: All right. Those are all the big ideas, right there, that we’ve gone through. I was talking earlier about . . .

Joanna: Oh, I didn’t mention the rate that we went from. So now we have-

Andrew: Oh, you have to rate number! I don’t know why I forgot, you know I love numbers.

Joanna: I know!

Andrew: So, let me show it again. This is the before, I do love numbers, and this is the after. Alright, what’s the difference?

Joanna: Well, now that they’ve got rid of their other products and aren’t talking about them, now it’s all about the reverse auction, and they do have a close rate on this, and it has a lot to do with the design here, of 90%. So, it’s an astounding close rate, and they’re really, really, super thrilled about it. Obviously, what business wouldn’t be? To have so many people come in and actually go through with doing a reverse auction. It’s amazing.

Andrew: Wow, they must love you. They a client of yours?

Joanna: They adore me.

Andrew: I bet.

Joanna: They’re not letting me go.

Andrew: I bet. That’s what I love about you. First of all, you explain your concept so well, but you don’t just explain them well, you don’t just teach well, you do it. And you do it for these big clients where you have to prove that your ideas work. I’m going to go over quickly, or just show quickly, the ideas that we covered here. I talked earlier about this feeling of overwhelm where you feel like, ‘I have to do everything or else this has been useless for me.’ You don’t. Just think about one, now that it’s up on your screen. Think about one thing that you can use, and think about how you can use it. I’m going to take a second here, to do it myself, here. [PAUSE] Alright, there we go. Now, I mentioned earlier, that you’re going to give anyone whose watching a copy of your first book. I mean, there’s no secret behind what you’re doing. You want to introduce people to your products, you want my audience to get to know you and get to know your products, and not just have a love for me, but to start getting to know you. And so, here, I actually have it up on my screen. Can I show the book that you’re going to give them?

Joanna: Sure.

Andrew: Yah, right? I don’t think that’d be a big deal.

Joanna: No, that’s great.

Andrew: So this is what I got when I bought. Is there anything secret here? Probably not. And, it’s number-it’s this one right?

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: “Copyhackers Book One, Where Stellar Messages Come From” I’ll just do, if I space bar. Yah, there it is. Really nice design on your stuff. And, this is the book they’ll get. And, of course, they can read it on their computer screens, on their iPads, on whatever they have.

Joanna: Yah, and the point of these books, what I intended to do and what I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on, is that they’re actionable. At the end of every chapter there is “What You Should Do Now With It.” Because, just as you said, you suffer from a lot of information overload if you just pour through it. And, now what? So, you’re crippled by too much information. They do all end with “Now, go do this on your site.”

Andrew: Great. We just thought of doing this, so there isn’t really a-we don’t know what to tell people, do we?

Joanna: Well, they can go to copyhackers.com and they can use a coupon code, mixer g, as the coupon code, if they put book 1 in their cart. Really, they can put any book in. It will be a $17.99 coupon code that we’ll let them have. I recommend Book 1, they’re organized this way for a reason, the “Where Stellar Messages Come From.” We were able to talk, of course, a bit about, obviously today this whole conversation was about, where messages come from and how to get there. But, there’s a lot more to be said about it, and that’s definitely all in book 1.

Andrew: There it is. Just copyhackers.com, and click on the copy writing e-books, or just go to copyhacking.com/shop. There’s the first one, get it. Put the word “Mixergy” in the coupon code, and it’s your for free.

Joanna: That’s right.

Andrew: Okay, Joanna, thank you for doing this session with us.

Joanna: Thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I’ve been a big fan for so long, I was super nervous before hand. So, thanks for making it a really good experience.

Andrew: Well, thank you, and I hope to have you back on here. And I hope anyone who got value out of this, not only will they use it, but if they got any value out of it, they’ll find a way to connect with you. I’m looking at your site right now, there are ways to connect with you. I think right on your site, right?

Joanna: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can contact me right through it, and I have . . .

Andrew: Right through the site, and say thank you. And if you get to know Joanna, I recommend that you ask her about how she even launched this book, and how this book is just growing and growing and growing, and specifically about that first week of launch that she did on Hacker News.

Joanna: That was really fun.

Andrew: And, above all that, frankly just say what I’m about to say right now, which is Joanna, thank you for teaching today.

Joanna: Thank you.

Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it.

Andrew: This course is about buying ads profitably. The course is led by Ilya Lichtenstein. He’s the founder of MixRank, which shows you exactly what ads are working for your competitors right now, and allows you to see their most ad copy, landing pages, and traffic sources across 93,000 sites and it feels almost evil. At the end of the session I’d like you to show how you do this.

My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, a site where proven entrepreneurs teach.

Ilya, can you give us an example of what the viewer who’s watching us right now will be able to do at the end of this session?

Ilya: Yes. So basically, you’ll be able to uncover traffic sources that you haven’t found before. That can be incredibly successful. That can send you massive traffic without worrying about key words or quality score irrelevance, or anything else that you typically have to deal with search traffic. I’ll talk about media buys, basically buying direct ad placements on highly relevant sites. So, here’s an example of a media buy campaign that I ran as an affiliate marketer. This was for a dating site, and these are all of the actual sites that we’re sending each traffic. These are one-day stats.

And you could see what kind of ROI I’m getting from this campaign–300, even 700% ROI in some cases. And the reason that I’m getting these results for these ads is because this campaign is highly targeted. It’s targeted to the exact right audience that I know will convert. And I’m not competing with eight other advertisers for the same ad slot, as I would in a typical search campaign. And so, here’s an example . . .

Andrew: Keep that up for a second, actually. Go back to that second tab, please. I want to make sure that people understand this. You and I went through this in the pre-interview, and I appreciate all the time you put into it. I want to make sure that everyone else is following along. So, we’re taking a look at the second line on the page right there–that’s love-only.com. That’s a website where you bought an ad directly and people are learning how you found them, how you know this would work, why you knew this would give you a high ROI. You got 26 clicks from them today, six leads from them today. You paid out $3 today. Your average cost per click is $.27, and your average earning-per-clicks are $.69. It’s a profitable campaign, $18 in income today, and that’s one website where you bought an ad, right?

Ilya: Yeah, and you could scale this across hundreds of sites pretty easily, and you’re always going to find a few that are just breakout hits, like some of these, here, that can give you massive traffic, and that will just blow away your expectations, basically–especially if you use competing on search, where the margins are really slim, and it may not work nearly as well.

Andrew: All right, one more thing. Go back to that first tab with your website. And the reason I want to do that is I think it’s a little, it comes across as a little suspicious when someone shows you their earnings. It seems like one of these . . . well, it feels a little shady. MixRank is a well respected website, backed by some of the most respected people in technology. Can you say who’s backing the company?

Ilya: Yes, we’re backed by Y Combinator. I just went through the latest summer batch, and we launched a couple months ago.

Andrew: Right. So this is a highly respected entrepreneur; a highly respected site. We’re showing stats because I know that all of my audience is from Missouri, the show-me state. They want to see numbers and thankfully the entrepreneurs, who are friends, who support the work we’re doing here at Mixergy want to help out, and so you’re showing your numbers. You said, just for today. Those are the stats just for today. We’re not showing your whole life history of stats. So, those are the odds that you bought, and you’re about to show us an example of where you bought the ad. That was the third tab. Let’s give people a sense of where you’re buying them.

Ilya: I don’t have that open. I can show you another media buy, just as an example of what these direct buys look like.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Ilya: Say for example, we’re a coupon site or a deal site. We might want to do a buy on Fat Wallet.com, which is a well-known deal site. And here’s an example of someone doing a media buys. So, this is Apple. On this coupon site, doing a direct buy, offering a coupon. Basically, it’s to list traffic, and that’s a great example of traffic that’s highly relevant and an ad that’s highly relevant. And the way I know that this is a direct buy is that I can basically refresh this page, and I will see the same ad here, meaning that it’s not remnant inventory, it’s not going through an ad network that’s just testing a bunch of ads.

This is really directly, highly targeted to this specific audience, and that’s why it works so well. You can basically do the same thing that they’re doing. You don’t have to be a big brand to do media buys. You can start with just a few hundred dollars and start seeing results almost immediately. You can find the right traffic sources that will give you the highest quality traffic and do these buys very quickly.

Andrew: And I know you’re going to show us how to find the right places and how to get the right deal. You’re going to give us the email that you send out when you’re negotiating an ad buy. But what I’m curious about is why this kind of ad? You explained to us why it’s better than buying ads in Google Search results, where you have to compete with others, and even Ad Sense, where you have to compete with other text links on the page. But why do direct and not go to an ad network, or go any other route? Why go through this trouble of identifying and contacting the website?

Ilya: Well, for one, an ad network takes a big cut, 30%, 40%, 50%. So, 50% of your spend is not going to the publisher. It’s going to the ad network, which means you’re paying a lot more for that same traffic. That’s one thing. The other reason is that a lot of these ad networks will actually not give you this level of transparency and tracking, and accountability. A lot of them are still designed for brands, especially the bigger display networks. So, you’re not able to target specific sites or specific traffic sources. You have to sort of target a channel, or a broad run of networks’ ad campaign.

And often times, when you go through an ad network you don’t even know where your own ads are running, and the reason they do that is that they don’t want you to cut out the middle man. They don’t want you to go direct and strip them of that 40% or 50% cut that they’re taking. And traditionally, the reason the ad networks have been successful is because there haven’t been tools available that let advertisers find these types of placements directly. So, the ad network says, OK, we’ll find these traffic sources for you, and we’ll manage your campaign, and you can cross your fingers and hope that it’ll perform well.

Nowadays, what you can do is basically cut out the middleman, run these campaigns directly, and build a direct relationship with the publisher that’s sending you traffic, meaning that you’ll get the best deal; they’ll make more from their ads than they would through an ad network, because that 40%, 50% is not being taken out. It’s a win-win; you get more traffic. You don’t have to compete with the other advertisers that might also be running on that same ad network and outbidding you. You typically wouldn’t even get into a bidding war with something like this. You would just do a direct deal, where you say I’ll pay you this much per month for this much CPM, or whatever. And that way you get all that traffic to yourself. It’s a lot cheaper and you can get it at a lot more transparency. You can get a lot more control of your campaign than you would going through an ad network.

Andrew: OK. All right. So, we see where the ads will go. We understand how profitable they are. We know where we’re going. What’s the first step to getting to this? What’s the first step to buying ads?

Ilya: The first step is very simple. You basically want to build a list of targets, build a list of sites that are sending the right kind of traffic that you want; build a list of sites that you can assume will convert well. And so, the way to do that is very simple. There are a few approaches. I have one specific approach that I’ve honed over years of doing media buys. So, I’m going to show you this one. There are others. And so, we’re going to stick with the coupon example, and say, you want to target that same audience of bargain shoppers, kind of a more frugal shopper. Say you have a coupon site, or a deal site, or something you want to target them. But this can be applied to any vertical, to any market.

The way I start is by going through social bookmarking sites. And the reason I do that is very specific. So for example, here’s ‘delicious,’ and I just search for coupons. And that’s all you need. All you need is to start with one key word. It doesn’t have to be a long tail keyword. It doesn’t have to be niche. It just has to be something that’s descriptive of your market, or your products, or your audience that you want to target. And the reason that I go through social bookmarking sites, versus just searching for your keyword, is that it lets you build a much more targeted list. It lets you build a list that is maybe not necessarily as obvious. So, sites like Fat Wallet, everyone knows about them, you’re going to be competing with Apple, if you want to try advertising on here. Some of these are a lot more long tail, especially if you keep going through this list. And yet, they’re highly relevant and you can start very simply and start building this list.

Andrew: Like, there’s a redplum.com on that list. I never heard of that website before. Maybe coupon people know it.

Ilya: I haven’t heard of any of these, but they’re highly relevant and these probably have the exact audience that I’m looking to reach.

Andrew: OK.

Ilya: And the other reason that I go through social networking sites to start, is that it really favors higher quality sites. Sites that people like, sites that people want to bookmark and keep coming back to, and that’s where you want your ads appearing on. You don’t want your ads appearing on a site that’s really good at SCO spam and can rank for all these keywords, but doesn’t provide a lot of value.

Andrew: Oh, I see.

Ilya: Someone who just stuffs their site with ads without any concern for the visitors. Because that’s going to cost you a lot of money. And the reason for that is that site is optimized for getting people to click on ads. And it’s not going to give you high quality traffic. It’s going to give you traffic that’s frustrated and bouncing.

Andrew: Tell me, do you have an example of a specific product and a specific category that you targeted that product to? I want to have an image of a real product that you are marketing, and I want to understand what you would have searched for through Delicious to find a place to market it.

Ilya: Actually this, I used to run pretty big affiliate campaigns for Groupon. And that’s why I kind of used this example because I know the space pretty well. So, this is basically the exact process I went through when I would build very successful affiliate campaigns for them.

Andrew: What did Groupon pay you? What was their affiliate commission?

Ilya: I think it was around $2.00 CPA for a free sign up.

Andrew: So every time you got someone to give up an email address, and agree to get email from Groupon you got $2.00? And you said “where do I go and run my ads”? Well I can go to an Ad network, but that’s overcrowded and they’re going to take a big commission? I can go to Google Ads, but then I’m competing with everyone else, including Groupon.com who’s buying ads? And Living Social who has a ton of money? I don’t want to do that, instead I’m going to think well coupon sites are a great marketplace for this kind of ad? I can’t necessarily go to Fatwallet and compete with Apple, but if I squirrel around I can find others that are smaller, assemble a collection of those, then I have a powerful platform?

And the same way you did that for Groupon, the person sitting in my audience who has a web app is going to be able to do it for their web app, when they find the right category? If they have a different kind of product or service their going to be able to do the exact same thing? We now understand the thought process here? OK, from there while you were scrolling down, what were you looking for while you were scrolling down there?

Ilya: I was looking through these tags actually, and I was looking to see how I can expand my list. So, starting from coupons this is a great example of starting from something that’s sort of obvious and going somewhere that might not be as obvious. See, it could go to something like bargains for example.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Ilya: Or you could go to deals. And you can kind of run through here and what I was looking at in this list. I was looking also at the number of people that have bookmarked this. Because if you kind of filter through here and find some kind of sweet spot. Where it’s not a completely huge site that thousands of people have bookmarked, but there is some core audience, that is highly relevant to this. Then that’s what you want to focus on. And there’s another bookmarking tool that I use that is actually even better for expanding this list.

Andrew: By the way, that seems like that’s a huge business. I keep hearing from entrepreneurs who will not do interviews with me on Mixergy about how their just in the affiliates space. They go to commisionjunction.com, maybe to clickbank.com. They find offers the way that you found the Groupon offer and then they go and they do ad buys like your doing. And they just do it in secret because they don’t have a well funded company that they need to promote. There not out in the open yet. And this is a whole business that’s earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in some cases true? You’re nodding, you’ve seen this right?

Ilya: Yeah, well before getting into startups I was in that industry for about five years. So I know it very well, and I kind of watched it grow and evolve, and it is a very secretive industry. And I think the only ones that are willing to share their secrets are the people that have got out of the space. That is doing something else. And the reason for that is because finding good campaigns is really, really hard. Unless you know where to look. Unless you have that expertise and that knowledge. So once they’ve found something that’s working, once they’ve found something that’s delivering them passive income, where they can find a media by. And run this every day, and keep generating positive ROI on it every day. That’s tremendously valuable.

Andrew: And that’ll just keep sitting there and working, and working, while you look for new keywords and new websites to go to. I see you’ve got a big smile on your face. All right, we’ll leave it there. So, you were saying you go to other bookmarking sites. What’s another bookmarking site that you go to? Boy, your screen just got really dark for some reason.

Ilya: Sorry, we’re going to have to edit this out.

Andrew: No, we can keep it in there. Let people understand that . . .

Ilya: My light shut off in my office.

Andrew: Oh, do you want to go and turn it on?

Ilya: Yeah, is that OK?

Andrew: Or is it one of those that you have to move your arm up and down for the light to come back?

Ilya: One second.

Andrew: Oh, go do it.

Ilya: I literally had to move; I was like, sitting still.

Andrew: I figured. I like that. I like how you’re very careful with the buck. I did an interview on Mixergy recently with someone who got a ton of funding, and then they went out of control and started buying special chairs, and started hiring too many people. Cheap is the way to go. All right. So you were saying there’s another bookmarking site.

Ilya: Yes. This is a fantastic site for research, and nobody knows about this because it’s not positioned as a marketing research tool. It’s positioned as a bookmark sharing tool. It’s called XMarks.com. The site is amazing. It’s probably the most relevant data I’ve ever seen, more relevant than any keyword tool, and this is where you find those long tail sweet spot, incredibly, incredibly relevant targets. And so, basically, what they do is they have a toolbar that you can use, and it’s very similar to the Delicious, where you can bookmark things and you can say the topic and category. But where I’m focusing here is this, right here–the related topics. So, I started off.

Actually, if we can take a step back I can show you how I got to this point. All I did was that I started typing coupon, and here are all of the super relevant categories that I can use to expand my search, and actually find the incredibly relevant sites that I know will do well with my media buys. And Coupon Blogs is one such example. Generally what you want to do when finding these targets for media buys is find sites that are not huge, like Fat Wallet. My rule of thumb is that I don’t deal with anyone who has an ad sales team. I like to go to the smaller bloggers. I like to go to forums, to discussion groups, to content sites, possibly even sites like Mixergy, where they have a passionate audience that loves the site, that will actually engage with the advertisements; possibly even just to support the site, support the blogger. And that’s where the high-quality traffic is. It’s not so much the big kind of corporate sites that may be Apple’s ad sales team will find, because they have a huge budget. But they’re not interested in the smaller sites, and the bloggers, necessarily.

Andrew: I see. You’re saying to yourself, if someone sees an ad on Mixergy, is he going to ignore it? Is he going to get upset? Or is he going to say, Oh, I know Andrew. It’s a good thing that Andrew’s getting some mad revenue. I want to support the sponsor, maybe even tell the sponsor that I saw him on Mixergy. Got it.

Ilya: Exactly.

Andrew: So, XMarks helps you find that. Why is XMarks better than Delicious, which is better known?

Ilya: Well, for one thing, it’s a lot harder to spam. Delicious has had a spam problem where people know that it sends significant traffic, because it’s better known. And you can basically just submit bookmarks very easily, and you can see that already, just looking through here, if you go probably a few pages back 80,000 bookmarks. I bet a large amount of them are spam, are low-quality sites. So that’s one reason. The other reason is that these categories are very well defined, and these sites are also ranked within these categories, which is actually pretty important, because you want sites that are very highly targeted.

So here’s an example, this is a site that would be a good example of a media buy that we’ll get to in a minute as an example. You can see it’s ranked highly in some of these categories that might not be very obvious to you, but that nonetheless, have a big, very focused niche audience. So Frugal, for example, is a great, great example, where all of these sites would be a really great fit for your deal site or your coupons or even is you’re an e-commerce merchant that has a sale, and you want to do some media advice for your products to promote whatever coupon you have or whatever you have on sell. A lot of these sites will be a really good target for that. I have a very active, very passionate community. You can find this for almost any niche. I bet you any hobby or any interest or any audience you can think of there’s some blog or forum or article site out there that’s targeted directly to them that is a pretty fit for their interest, that’s a site they trust that has credibility with them, that has worked with them.

Andrew: Let’s try it now together. Let’s pretend that I was going to sell my premium program and I want, so, not selling coupon or not selling someone else affiliate program, I want to sell my membership program. Maybe I think that start-ups are a good place to look for . . .

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . potential customers.

Ilya: Look at this by the way. Look at this.

Andrew: So, start-ups advice . . . Where would you go? Would you go directly to the first one or do you go to all of them?

Ilya: I would probably browse a few just to get a sense of who’s there. So, start-up blogs might be a really good idea. The reason that you want to go there is . . . And see if you’re into start-ups you probably know all of these sites already. But, someone who might not necessarily be as attuned to this world might not. Also, as you keep going down this list, take a look here, so, actually we can do even better. How about this? Well, see, I don’t know if you’re in here. You might not be in here. But, hey, look at that. OK. Perfect. So, you can start with your own site and you can go through here. Here are similar sites . . .

Andrew: I see.

Ilya: . . . and here are the categories that you’re in. So, say you want to target entrepreneurship traffic, for example. Here are all of these sites about start-ups. So, looking through this list, what do I see? I see here an entrepreneur forum. That’s probably a good fit. That seems like it’s a very finely targeted audience. So, yeah, let’s go here and see if this would be a good media by target.

What do I see here on this target?

If you want to do a media buy, here’s something I forgot to mention, there’s a great tool for a Google Chrome called Chrome SCO. It’s a free extension. It gives you a ton of information about a site. I have it installed here. This is the first thing I always do when I visit a new site that I don’t know that much about. I’ve never seen this site before, so, I don’t know much about it. So, I’m going to open this Chrome SCO extension and we’ll see what I find.

This gives you a ton of data, basically aggregated from all of these other sites that’s all in one place. We have how many back links they have. We have their [??]. This is pretty good [??]. We have their traffic estimate. Comcast is not always accurate, but it gives you a sense of how much traffic they’re getting. Looking here, this site probably goes in my sweet spot where I was talking about before where you don’t want it to be a huge site.

If this was several hundred thousand or several billion visitors, this would probably not be that good of a fit. I would probably have to go through an ad sales team. I would be competing with friends. I would probably have to go through this whole process to do a media buy on this site. If it’s a relatively small site where I don’t have to spend a ton of money to test this traffic and I don’t have to spend a lot of time negotiation this buy, it’s a perfect fit.

Looking through this site, what do I like here? Here’s one thing that I like immediately. I noticed this right away on this site. What we’ll probably do for this course is I’ll probably write up a checklist of things that you should look for in a media buy target. This is one of them, this is they have a newsletter which means two things; one is that if they have any number of subscribers to this newsletter as I’m sure you know, that means they have really high quality traffic on that newsletter on that email list highly targeted and traffic that they could reach very, very quickly.

If I could do some kind of deal with them where I could say, “Let’s advertise on your newsletter or maybe even send something out about my sight” then this would be a fantastic way to get a ton of traffic very quickly because you benefit from all of the visitors that have come to this site for months or years. Some percent of them, the people that are most likely to convert, to sign up for something, to sign up for a newsletter have signed up to this list. This is an incredibly high quality list. It’s a highly targeted list and you would want to put in a lot of effort to somehow to promote yourself to this list.

Andrew: How do you get someone to put your ad in an email newsletter?

Ilya: You send them a compelling email.

Andrew: We’ll talk about that later.

Ilya: You just have to align the incentives and make it valuable for them to do that and add value. So that’s one thing I saw. Another thing that I see here is that this is a content site with blogs. This has articles. It has pod casts, which is pretty relevant to you, and it has a community. That is another thing I always really, really like. For one, because you have accurate stats. Usually a forum, you can look at a member list or you could look at something like that where you say, they have 100,000 members. That means they’ve got my attention. This is pretty valid. This means that I’m not going to be wasting my time going back and forth with them, negotiating with them for maybe just a few clicks.

So that’s really good and they have active forums, that’s another thing I look for, and they have classifieds, which is kind of interesting because that means that this is how their monetizing right now. The one thing that I always look for, when I go to any site, is who is advertising on there right now? How many ads do they have? Who are they monetizing and how? Do they have some kind of premium section? Do they sell something? Do they have advertisers that are consistently . . .

Andrew: Why do you want to know which, why do you want to know what kind of advertising they have on their site right now? How is it different for you to know that they’re doing direct sales versus working with an ad network versus selling their own products?

Ilya: Well for one, you know that they do direct sales if that is what they do. The problem with some blogs or some smaller sites is that they don’t want to deal with your advertising. They say, ‘Oh we have our Google AdSense Ads and it’s doing pretty well, so why stir the pot? Why try something new? Why take a risk? If you want to advertise on our site, just use Google AdSense,’ or whatever and that’s mostly a problem with the smaller sites. There are ways to get around it, but that is an issue where people are not willing to engage in that conversation.

The other thing that you want to see is . . .

Andrew: I’m sorry, before you go to the other thing, do you prefer a site that is working with an ad network or with Goggle to run their ads or do you prefer a site that’s already doing ads directly?

Ilya: It depends to who so, if they’re doing ads directly to big brands, if when you email, they respond and say here’s our media kit and it’s very brand centric, then you’re going have a really, really tough time competing and actually finding that you can negotiate with them and get a good deal. Because brands consistently overpay for traffic. They don’t care about performance. They just want eyeballs for their brand.

If there are a lot of brand advertisers going direct that is a problem. Conversely though, if they have an ad network with a lot of brand ads that’s actually good. Traditionally those brand networks don’t pay very well and they have trouble filling all of their inventory through that ad network. Because the ad network takes such a big cut, generally what you’ll see is that the traffic that’s going through an ad network is remnant inventory, it’s unsold inventory, it’s inventory that they weren’t able to sell direct, and so they’ll be happy to sell that inventory directly to you.

Looking through here, we see that these are brand ads and we see that these are not necessarily very highly targeted brand ads. I’ve been looking through the site and seeing whose advertising on the site and where. So, we have this 300 x 250 unit right here, that’s an AT&T ad, we’ve another non-standard format, bigger ad unit here, that’s another AT&T ad and it is sort of relevant in that it’s business-targeted but I bet you could get better performance from your ads. I bet if you said, “Learn how to take your business to the next level. Learn about entrepreneurship.”, you could probably beat the click rate of these ads right here.

Andrew: How could you tell if it’s an-, I see. So then already I have an advantage.

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: I’m better targeted than they are so I’m in a better position to monetize than they are and pay more . . .

Ilya: Do you like how they’re split-testing, by the way? I don’t know if you picked up on that.

Andrew: No, I haven’t.

Ilya: I recently picked up on that. So it’s $70 a month here but if you go down to this one it becomes $75.

Andrew: Oh, get out.

Ilya: Yeah so it’s all these little things that they split-test so that’s . . .

Andrew: You know, what that tells me first of all is that you have a really different eye for this than I would. What is it about this that tells you whether they’re working directly with an ad network or if-, sorry, whether they’re working directly or with an ad network? Do you look at the source or do you just take a look at that and you can tell?

Ilya: So if I just hover over that you can see in my browser that that’s going. I know that’s an ad network tracking URL.

Andrew: Got you. Right.

Ilya: And then you could follow the link and all to see where it goes.

Andrew: Keep it on there for a sec. Oh, yeah, OK. You’re just. . .

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . if people can see it, I think, on their screens, they can see the bottom left-hand corner where it’s . . .

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . where it’s showing the URL that the ad goes to, is clearly an ad network. He just right-clicked and opened it up in a new tab.

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: So there we go. Right there. It’s clearly an ad network that’s redirecting.

Ilya: Yeah ad network.

Andrew: If it was AT&T.net or AT&T.com . . .

Ilya: Right. And also you could look at things-, you could look at, like, where the ad is hosted. So this is hosted on that same ad network tracking URL. So going down here, here is another thing that’s interesting. This is their house ad in this advertisement slot. Which means that they literally can find nobody to buy this inventory right now. And the reason for that is that they’re probably not big enough to go direct. So this place right here – they’re probably making next to nothing out of. And the reason that it’s unsold is because it’s below the fold, is one of them.

So if you look here, this is important, especially if you’re paying CPM for these ads. So this ad is above the fold. All these are below the fold. And so here are all of their ads. If we go back to the homepage you can see something also very different where you see this. These are all sort of, basically, ad network low-paying brand ads that are, sort of, business-targeted. These are education paper-click ads, investment ads, charity ads, meaning this is probably completely unsold. And then more of these AT&T ads. Here’s another interesting thing here. So these might be more of a direct buyers, some kind of direct deal that they did where it’s outside of their traditional ad channels where they say, “We’ll spotlight your product.” And these are all, of course, business targeted products.

Andrew: So, actually, when I first brought this up, I thought, “Start-ups are a bad topic to use as an example because the people who have blogs in this space are guys like Mark Suster, Fred Wilson, who have blogs about their venture capital activities and their opinions and they don’t need money from advertising. And I thought the same thing about TechCrunch. You just proved that even in this space, where there’s a lot of money . . .

Ilya: You could find it anywhere.

Andrew: . . . that it’s competitive. You can find it anywhere. OK.

Ilya: There are so many. OK. So the next step is expanding our lists a little more and looking at actually identifying our audience a lot more precisely and trying to go through demographic or psychographic factors. So can start with this one and we can go to Quantcast. Quantcast is a fantastic site that will give you really, really relevant demographic data that you can use so then expand your list further because you don’t want to be on just sites about start-ups. You want to be on sites that are probably targeting that same audience and that may be as interested in entrepreneurship, or what have you, but not necessarily the ones that are going on start-ups sites because those guys go to other sites too all around the web and we want to find where they’re concentrated. So if you know the demographic of your audience-, so I just type this in here-, so you know you want to target higher-income people that are also highly educated.

Andrew: Now would I type in my own website at the top or one of the sites that I found on XMarks or one of the other bookmarking sites?

Ilya: You can do your own too. Basically you want to identify where you’re demographics are that you’re reaching now and what demographics you want to reach. If you want to reach an audience you’re not currently reaching, you want to test something new, then you would basically look for other sites, here the site that we looked at before was probably a little more descriptive of your audience. What you want to look for, things here that stand out that are highly above the mean. Already we can see that you’re audience, at least according to Quantcast is more likely to have kids and more likely to be college educated, but what we want to do is find as wide an audience that’s possible that’s relevant.

Quantcast has this tool called ad planner, it’s a free tool you can sign up and you can start finding targets that way to buy audience. What you can do is look for either the specific demographic factors that you’re looking at so, maybe high income, maybe highly educated, and you can start filtering that way. You can look for — what you want to do here is — the cool thing is you can filter by their estimated traffic. You don’t want the very high traffic sites. You want within that sweet spot of maybe even 10k to 100k, the other thing that you can do is go through here.

Andrew: That’s right on the left, on the filters that’s where you’re doing it? So, if for example, we saw that everyone in the start-up world was running a website either as expensive or popular as Tec Crunch or as lacking in ads as Fred Wilson’s blog, I might say I’m going to stay away from there, but what I’m going to do is find who reads those sites? What ages are they? What stands out about them and I’ll go look for other sites that cater to them.

Ilya: Yeah. The cool thing here is that you can actually find sites that are similar to another site. People who visit Mixergy also visit, oh, they don’t have that, but people who visit TechCrunch.

Andrew: Let’s pause there for a second. I want people to see what you’re typing, you’re doing this very quickly. There it is, it’s right on the left, on filters. You hit apply and then you can find other websites that are similar to that site, that accepts advertising and you’re also narrowing it based on traffic.

Ilya: Yeah. If we actually go back here, TechCrunch is a great example because it’s a high traffic site and so, oh, they hide all their stuff, how about that, but we can go back here to Mixergy and what we can see is that, all right this is a bad example.

Andrew: Can you do a [??]? I want to get a sense of maybe the coupon space, if you were going to go back to that first example, what that would look like.

Ilya: Yeah. This is perfect, [??] is a huge consumer site and generally this does well for a consumer site. You could see these categories that audience also likes, here are the sites that they are most likely to visit, and actually we can go to another tool called Google Ad Planner, this is a more comprehensive tool, it’s kind of like Quantcast, here’s Mixergy and the cool thing that you can do here, is here you go, here’s the site Affinity so, people who are likely to visit Mixergy are also likely to visit TechCrunch. I can go through here and people who visit TechCrunch, visit Venture B, and Search Engine Watch, and all these other sites. You can go through here and keep building your list, keep seeing where you can get good traffic.

Andrew: That’s the goal of this stage of the process.

Ilya: You want to build a big list. You want to build a list that’s as big as possible within those constraints of traffic greater than X. Going back here, I think the site that we found was this one, Startup Nation. This is my spreadsheet that I would typically fill out with some of the data. I would just start building this spreadsheet and basically, you want to have a comprehensive list and then you want to start filtering it as much as possible.

Andrew: Let’s see what’s on your spreadsheet. It’s the site . . .

Ilya: Yeah. Sorry. I’m going to go back here and grab this data from . . .

Andrew: That’s where you grab the site data because there are so many places to grab it. You’re keeping it consistent and it looks like you’re going for Quantcast?

Ilya: Yeah. This is U.S. traffic, Quantcast basically monitors U.S. traffic. If we want to target U.S. Traffic, that’s where we want to go. We’ll go here and we’ll fill in, so this will be 25,000 and up, another really interesting thing that you want to look at and this will be in Google Ad Planner is that you want to look at what are some of the usage patterns for this site; how do people use the site. Do people come back; is this a quality site? So, you have to keep in mind that when you’re doing these ad buys, you’re probably paying CPM, or per impression, and you don’t want to keep bombarding people with the same ad over and over again. They’re not going to convert. They’re just going to waste your money.

So, if you look here, this is actually a really bad example of targeting, because they’re paying for this ad and they’re paying for this ad. And they’re probably going to keep paying for more ads. If I keep refreshing this page, I’m going to keep seeing their ads as we’ve seen a bunch of times, and they just keep spending money on this. So, we’re cost them like ten impressions, now. And so, you don’t want sites that have a ton of page views per visitor, necessarily. You don’t want sites where people will keep refreshing the page. And so, that’s where this comes in, at Google Ad Planner.

Andrew: The Google Ad Planner, that’s Google.com/adplanner.

Ilya: Yeah. And we could probably link to all of these tools, after.

Andrew: Yeah, we’ll have it all in there.

Ilya: And so, what we see here is the number of visits that they get a month; and here is the number of page views. And so, what we’re looking at is the ratio of page views to visit. It’s about six, on average.

Andrew; What are we looking for? Are we looking for a higher than six, or are we looking for lower than six?

Ilya: We’re looking for lower. So, you want to expose your ad to as many people as possible. And you don’t want to keep showing it to the same person. If it’s a site where every visitor views a ton of pages, and every one of those pages costs you, because they’re seeing your ad, that’s bad. If you were to go through an ad network you could set some kind of impression cap, and you could say, I want you to only show this ad to a unique visitor three times. But if you can’t do that, if you’re doing it direct buy, usually what they’ll negotiate is, they want to sell you all their impressions, right? They don’t want to say, OK, we’ll only sell you the first impression, the first time someone visits our site and sees your ad. That impression is the most valuable.

So, they’re going to try to bundle in as much of their inventory as possible. And that’s kind of part of the negotiation process. But, that’s why you kind of have to look at the sites’ stats, and you want to also ask the web master for these numbers, if possible. But they might try to tweak them, and inflate them, or they’ll give you the global numbers, which could be different.

Andrew: Once you buy the ad, you can keep track of how many impressions you’re getting on your own, right?

Ilya: Yeah. So, what you would do then, and this is actually tying in nicely into the next step of what we’re going to do.

Andrew: Before you go to the next step let me put a pin in that for a moment and take a look at your Excel spreadsheet one more time with the audience, so we can all see what’s on there. The goal of that section that we just covered is to put this list together. You want to know how many sites meet your criteria, what types of sites they are, what are the uniques, if you’re targeting U.S., how many page views per visit you’ve got. Cost we don’t know yet, right?

Ilya: Yeah, this will come later as we start negotiating.

Andrew: Gotcha.

Ilya: The costs, the minimum amounts of time I need to run an ad, or the minimum commitment I need to make. And then, this is just the status of the buy that we’ll keep updated on.

Andrew: Got it. Did I buy this ad or not?

Ilya: Yeah. And how did it do?

Andrew: How did it do? OK. I was asking you about how we keep track after we buy. Is there software that you recommend?

Ilya: Yes. Usually ad servers are designed for brands, and most ad servers, or the software that’ll actually serve your ad and keep track of it are super expensive, and they require very high minimum spend and are very brand focused. But there are a couple that you can use, and here’s one. There’s one ad server called Ad Shuffle, and this is a tool that’s very much self serve. You don’t need to be a huge advertiser to use this. It’s relatively simple to use. It has a fifty-dollar minimum spend. So, this software may seem expensive in that they charge you per impression.

Usually, they’ll charge you like between $.01 to $.05 for 1,000 impressions, or CPM, your ad is shown. It’s not like a fixed monthly rate. It’s not like you could pay, like, 20 bucks a month or something. But it’s definitely worth it. And the reason that you want to use something like this–and it’s kind of like a whole process of getting an ad up through here, but it’s very step-by-step–is that basically it gives you two things. It gives you reliability, and it gives you accountability. So if you were to host an ad yourself, then. . .

Andrew: There are the lights again. Cool. There it goes.

Ilya: Sorry about that. OK. So if you were to host an ad yourself, then basically what would happen is, say your server slows down because you’re all this traffic from your new media buys, your ad that is getting served from your server, from your websites, gets slowed down, as well. And that could hold up loading the whole page for the site that it’s appearing on. And so that can be very, very bad. That can piss off the publisher. So a lot of these publishers will not even deal with you unless you go through an ad server.

Another ad server that I want to mention very briefly is this one. And this is Google DoubleClick for Publishers. And this is free, but it’s designed for publishers, not for advertisers. So if I want to have an ad on my site, or I want to sell ads on my site directly, I would use something like this.

So there two approaches. Either you could pay for an ad server, like AdShuffle, that you can control, or if you’re going doing a direct buy on a site, you could go to the publisher and say, sign up for a Google DFP and give me whatever I need to get set up in here and I’ll upload my ads and we’ll go from there.

And the reason that you need these, aside from reliability, is accountability. Meaning that whenever you do a media buy, you always want to go, especially if you’re doing a CPM type buy, meaning that you’re paying for 1000 impressions, versus something where you might be paying a fixed monthly rate, you always want to go off the ad server numbers, off their stats. And so that means that, however many impressions the ad server says it served, that’s how many you pay for.

That means that the publisher can’t con you. They can’t just say, well, my site gets whatever, x number of impressions, so pay me this much, or pay me this much upfront. Also, you can’t lie and say, well, my stats show more clicks or impressions than your stats, therefore go off my numbers. So you want a neutral third party. You want something that’s well-known and trusted. That’s why you want to go off this ad server.

And it’s pretty self-serve. Basically, the way the process works is you upload your ad creatives and you basically put in the URL that you want to link to, and it will spit out a tag with some code. And you say, OK, just paste in this ad code in your site. Very simple. Paste in this ad code and replace your existing ads with it. Or put it in rotation with your existing ads.

Andrew: That’s it. You just give them the code. It’s ready to go. It’s being monitored. You know exactly how well it’s doing.

Ilya: Exactly. And you want it to be as simple as possible, for them and for you. So you don’t want it to be a lot of work. The reason that publishers use ad networks is that the ad network takes care of monitoring the ads, tracking the stats, geo-targeting rotation. All of that. You can do all of that yourself with an ad server, and that’s what you want to do.

Andrew: All right. Let’s see the next step. What’s the next step that our listener and viewer has to do?

Ilya: So you’ve signed up for an ad server.

Andrew: Yep.

Ilya: And now you have your ad tag that you’re ready to send to publishers. And you have your list in here. Presumably it will [??] be a big list. You could it pull it from here, all these sites. You have this big list of publishers that you want to target. And what you want to do at that point is actually start doing these deals, start sending out emails.

And what we want to look for on a site, the first thing that we want to look for, of course, is something that accepts advertising. So I’m going to look on this site that I found from XMarks, and I’m going to see if I can find any contact info on here. So I would scroll around, and here’s this little link that says, email me. So I would email them and I would say, I want to do a media buy, I want to appear in this sidebar. Some sites may have a more formal process for this, but a lot of these smaller sites don’t even have a dedicated advertised link, necessarily. These guys do, and that’s what I was looking for.

When they have advertised link, the good thing is that you know exactly who to reach. You know they’re willing to sell advertising directly, because they have this whole site; and you know what the rates are. Usually the rates are not displayed on this page, and because they are varied so much. So if you go up to them and say, I’m a huge brand, and I just want as many impressions as possible on your site, they’re going to give you very, very different rates than if you say, I’m an entrepreneur, just like you. I’m trying to get more attention for my site. I want to negotiate some buy with you. Let’s do a test. So usually, what you’ll see is something like this, where it just says, our CPMs vary, based on the size of the ad, the percent of inventory available, and so on.

Andrew: And you’re saying that is what we want? This is the ideal situation?

Ilya: This is typical. Obviously, the ideal thing would be if they say here’s how much it costs. Here’s how much inventory we can give you, and here’s what you have to do. Usually this will not be published on here.

Andrew: Why do you want someone who’s that clear about their pricing? Don’t you want people who are undiscovered, who haven’t sold a lot of ads yet, so that you can come in with the cheaper price to not have to compete against other buyers?

Ilya: Well, it depends. What you’ll actually find is that a lot of these publishers that maybe haven’t sold ads before, or have only gone through certain ad networks or only dealt with brands have very, very unreasonable expectations of what they’re traffic is worth, and how much you should pay, and how the process works.

And so, there’s kind of a middle ground, sweet spot where a publisher has maybe sold a few ads directly, can run things smoothly, can give you a fair deal. But at the same doesn’t have a bit ad sales team, doesn’t have a big rate card that they give to agencies and big brands. You want someone like this, where they at least are interested in accepting advertising. And here’s what’s funny . . .

Andrew: They say our ads vary if they have a rate cards.

Ilya: Yeah, over here it says vary. And the reason for this is that a lot of the time agencies or big brands will demand some kind of media kit, and this can be good for you. This is kind of a warning sign for me, almost actually, because they will tell you that our audience is a very premium audience, which maybe a good fit for you. So something of this age range, this income, maybe that’s really lucrative to brands. So you want to watch out for that.

On the other hand, 71% of their traffic is existing business owners and 29% are aspirational business owners. That might be a really good fit for you. So, this is something that I always look for that might give you really good data, especially qualitative survey data like this, where you can sort of match it up to your own audience. And you can look at traffic quality, and see, OK, this audience is the exact audience I want. I want people who are small-time entrepreneurs who are starting out, who want to grow their business. I want people who visit the site a certain amount of times. But again, you have to be cautious. You have to be cautious with their metrics. They may be somewhat skewed.

Andrew: Yeah, Comcast had different numbers than they have over here.

Ilya: So, it’s not perfect. It may be right, but it’s in their interests to make these numbers look as good as possible. If you notice this really interesting, actually, they break out the number of page views per visit. And remember, you want a low number of page views per visit. The number of page views per visit is normally very, very high on forums, because you’re clicking through, you’re paging through these threads, and you may not be paying as much attention to the content of the page. You want people who spend a long time on the page, who have read through the article, and are looking for, OK, what am I going to do next? What’s my next step?

Well, maybe I want to learn more and click on this ad that’s highly related to this article. That’s why they break it out, so now when you negotiate a buy maybe you want it negotiated so you’re not advertising on the forums, you’re advertising on the articles that people are spending a long time on. This is a perfect example of the data that you want to collect before doing this buy-in on stuff like this right here.

Andrew: All right. We understand that stuff. What do we do now? You’re looking to see their prices.

Ilya: The prices are there and these prices are absurd. Basically these rates are exclusively for brands and for agencies that say, send us your media kit.

Andrew: Can you hit command plus on your keyboard so that we can see it a little bit better on our screens?

Ilya: Yeah, let me see that.

Andrew: Yeah, now let’s see the prices.

Ilya: I bet you’re not getting these kind of CPMs anywhere right here.

Andrew: $30 CPMs is what they have. Run of site $35.

Ilya: Yeah, exactly. So this is not for you. This should not be a baseline that you’re negotiating from. This is really for agencies that get paid a percent spend and so they want the high CPMs because they can go to their client and say, hey look, we’re putting your budget to work. We’re spending all this money and getting traffic.

By the way, if you read the fine print, we were talking about this before, newsletter based opportunities are available and that’s probably where you want to advertise. When negotiating these buys it’s kind of a balance. You don’t want to seem like you’re going to waste their time.

You want to seem legitimate and credible, but you don’t want to come off as someone who’s willing to spend a ton of money testing, you’re just going to throw down this crazy CPM for run-of-site traffic. You want to kind of start off at a much lower number. The way to reduce CPM prices, usually the way to get these prices down is buying anything. Unfortunately, you have to buy in bulk and then you get the bulk discount.

You say OK, well I know that you’re having trouble selling all your inventory. Let’s do some kind of sponsorship for a monthly deal and this is kind of the example of the sponsorships they offer where you’ll probably be paying much less than this once it actually comes down to it.

You’ll actually probably be getting a lot cheaper traffic overall advertising on this site than whatever the brands are paying. Basically what you want to do is create some sense of certainty for the advertiser. The reason that direct media buys are so much more effective than going through ad networks and the reason they’re so much better for the advertiser is that is creates certainty and stability and predictability.

If you’re going through AdSense you could get slapped by Google, you could get Smartpriced, a big advertiser could decide they don’t like you anymore and blacklist your site, Google could ban you, the ad network could decide to place your site in a different category that pays less.

Day by day, all of the time, all of this stuff can change so much, versus doing a direct buy where you come to a site and say we’ll sponsor you for a month or 3 months if it’s doing well and you’re guaranteed this income. That is really appealing to a lot of these publishers and they’re going to be willing to take a lower rate as long as it’s a stable payout.

That’s why they have all of these sponsorship opportunities here. You can even see the difference between a monthly sponsorship and a 3-month sponsorship is pretty significant and you can negotiate that down quite a bit more I imagine.

What they’re trying to do here, as in any good negotiation, is they’re trying to anchor you to these prices. They’re trying to say, OK, our traffic is worth $30 CPM, but you’re a nice guy, how about we give you $25 CPM?

Andrew: And now $25 doesn’t seem so high, they could pay $30.

Ilya: Exactly. What you want to say is, I know how much this traffic to me is worth. I know what my CPA target is. I know what I’m looking for. Let’s start with $5 CPM and test if it does well, so what you want to say is, ‘Let’s test this for like a week or two weeks, where maybe it won’t cost that much.’ and you could see, even here, this is actually a pretty reasonable minimum budget. You could probably get it down to 500 bucks even or maybe even 200 bucks and you say, ‘OK. Let’s just test it for a week.’ and what you want to start with is an anchor. You don’t want to start with this where you ask them, ‘How much do you want?’ You want to start with, ‘How much are you getting now? How much are you selling your cheapest inventory for right now?’ So, the magic word right there is the remnant inventory, meaning the inventory that remains.

That’s a good question. So, how much are you getting right now for your remnant inventory? Exactly. So, inventory that you’ve not sold, that’s the inventory that I want to buy. You don’t want to be competing for the brand premium inventory. You want the rest that’s on the same site, it is still a quality inventory, but it might not be exactly as targeted to these brands.

All right. So, what’s the next step? Now that we’ve figured out where to pitch our offer, how to figure out the pricing, where to contact the person, what’s next? Actually, before I ask what’s next, if the contact information is not on the website, how do you find the site’s email address? That depends. If you go through Who Is, you can almost always find some contact info there. In fact, you’re required by the Registry to keep updated contact info on your Who Is. I would argue though that, generally, if they don’t have an advertising page, if they don’t have their contact info anywhere on the site, which is honestly pretty rare, at the very least they’ll have a contact form or something usually, but if they don’t have that info then they probably don’t want to be contacted.

And you would stay away? You wouldn’t try? I would probably stay away, especially when there are so many of these traffic sources that do want to be contacted and that have a lot of inventory that’s unsold that you can buy and get a lot of traffic from. You want to basically start off going for the low hanging fruit. You want to optimize for advertisers that have decent traffic that’s relevant and that can decide quickly that you can do a deal quickly. You don’t want to go somewhere where they have these ridiculous CPMs and they won’t budge and you’re trying to go back and forth, negotiate. You want to basically send a few emails, do a buy and then move on to somewhere else because you want to be able to do this quickly and you want to be able to do it at scale.

So, this site will not send you a massive amount of traffic, but 10 or 20 or 50 sites just like this combined, will. In aggregate, this traffic will be much cheaper than the traffic you would get anywhere else and you’re not limited by search. Once you have these going and in place, the same rule of stability applies. This traffic can be incredibly stable. Once you find these golden targets that are working well, you could basically be running on there for months and you don’t have to worry about someone else coming in, like you would on search and outbidding you or getting slapped with a low-quality score or anything like that. Once you have these buys going, you’re pretty much set and you have passive income or passive traffic coming in consistently and so that’s what you want.

All right. What’s the next step? So that’s pretty much it. I would say the only other next step is, going back, if you have our spreadsheet and just filling all of this in and tracking the status and going through your analytics. There’s a tool called URL Builder that you can use very easily to set up your Google Analytics to track these buys or you could just set up your URL manually.

You just Google for the words Google URL Builder? Yeah, it’s kind of your URL, but if you search for Google Analytics URL Builder, you’ll find it. Basically, what this will do is, it will set up your tracking URLs, that’s going to be the destination URL for your ad. The way you fill out this tracking, and this is in addition to setting up goals in Google Analytics and tracking your conversions and all that, but the most important thing here, is tracking as much as possible. What you want is to basically fill in pretty much all of these fields, minus the keyword one.

So, right here what we would fill in is say, startupnation.com and maybe we’re getting on a CPM basis. So, we’re paying per 1,000 impressions and if we’re testing and say maybe this campaign is targeted toward start-ups and we’re testing different creatives. So, you always want to create different banners and different creatives. So, if we are testing a few of them, the most important thing that probably 90 percent of people don’t do and they miss out on a ton of money and conversions is to track everything. It’s kind of a pain, but you have to do it.

So, if you have four different ads that you’re testing on the site, you want to track each one. So, this one will be maybe 300 by 251, I’ll call that. And that’s the way you’re tagging the URL to say, ‘I used the 300 by 250 ad.’ The first one? Yeah. Now, the URL on the bottom? This is the URL that comes out and so that is the destination URL.

So instead of sending traffic to Mixergy.com, where people would buy, I would send them to that URL that you just created? Yes. That’s what I give the publisher when I buy the ad from him? Exactly, and that’s where you put in your ad survey and whatever. The reason you want to differentiate ads and track each one is because different ads with different copy, or even possibly appearing on different pages, could actually convert differently.

So, when you’re thinking of how to optimize a campaign, a really big mistake that a lot of novices make, is that they optimize for click-thru rate. They say, ‘OK. I’m going to test four of these different ads and I’m going to track the click-thru rate for all of them, but I’m going to focus on the most attention grabbing one. The one that gets the most clicks and that’s the one I’m going to use going forward.’ That’s a huge mistake because what you really want to focus on is traffic quality. What gets you the most qualified clicks? What gets you the most relevant traffic?

And so, if you’re testing different ads with different headlines, different copy on them, you want to make sure that you track every single one, all the way through your final and be able to say, ‘OK. List ad copy on this specific site, converts this well for me.’ If you track it down to that level and actually figure out the ads that convert the best, then you can see much better results and that’s how you get to the really big ROI, verses just focusing on clicks and ending up paying for a lot of clicks that might not be very high quality.

And you don’t have go to Google Analytics and enter the URL in? Google Analytics automatically reads that URL properly? It has the refers and all that, so you can run custom reports in Google Analytics and segment it however you want. You can see the specific pages that are sending you traffic, specific sites and then, you can also actually, the really interesting stuff, and I’m sure someone who is more of an analytics expert can speak more to this, but what I have tested before, pretty successfully, is optimizing not just for conversions, but for things like time-on-site in analytics, for example.

So, which media buys are going to be sending me people that are going to be spending a lot of time on my site, that are going to be spending time watching my videos, that I know are going to be coming back and be high-quality traffic. So, the main thing to always remember is that you’re interested in traffic quality and that’s why we do this whole painstaking research process, because we don’t want to just find sites that are about startups. We want sites that will actually send us really good, really high-quality traffic. If we traffic everything and find those, then that’s how we get successful media buys going.

We’re almost out of time, but there are two things that we promised people that we would get to, that I want to make sure that we’re going to get to. The first is, the email that you sent out. Let’s take a look at the template and we’ll give this template to anyone who is taking this course. Yes, there are a few templates I can show you. This is a very basic one. It says, ‘Hello. I came across your site. I represent Mixergy and we’re interested in advertising. We would like to buy ad space, both in the U.S. and internationally. We have this budget for this test or we can launch a campaign immediately. Please put me in touch with the right person to discuss this further. And there are a few points that I want to touch on in this email. The first one is this very important thing; it says, ‘We want to buy ad space from you directly.’

And that means we want to do a direct buy. We’re not going to waste your time. We’re not interested in going through ad networks. We’re not advertising through AdSense. We want to do a direct buy. So, that’s one thing. The other thing here is that I say that I want traffic both in the U.S. and internationally, and that’s very important, because a lot of the advertisers coming in will be U.S. consumer packaged goods brands that would want geo-target ads, not just to the U.S., but even maybe to a specific local market. And so, if you say that I’m interested in your traffic. I know it’s a good fit for my audience. I want to buy it both U.S. and international traffic, and even if you’re mostly interested in the U.S. traffic, you should still always say this, because that’ll open them up. They’ll respond. They’ll say, OK, well we have some U.S. traffic, and then we also have a ton of international traffic that we haven’t sold, that we’re very interested in selling.

The next thing is the budget thing. This is pretty important, and I’ve actually split tested different numbers, and this is the number that we’re expressed. Even if this isn’t my specific budget for this specific site, my budget could be $2,500 for the site, but you still say this, because that means that they can take me seriously. That means that they’re not going to have to deal with someone and go back and forth through negotiation with someone who’s going to say, OK, I have $50 that I want to spend.

Andrew: So, by saying I have a $25,000 budget for this test, you’re saying I’m worth dealing with. But what happens later on when you want to come back and say, I only want to do a $200 a week test?

Ilya: All you say is that is just that. I want to do a test.

Andrew: Before this test.

Ilya: Right.

Andrew: You’re saying, basically, $25,000, you’ve split tested it, gets their attention, and gets the right response. That’s just an opening comment . . .

Ilya: If you’re putting in a dollar and getting four dollars back, even if you start with $2,500, you would probably be happy to put in $25,000. So you say, we’re ready to spend this much. We want to see that this traffic is going to do well first. We want proof; we want data, and the other thing, we can launch a campaign immediately. So, we want to get going. We have this money that’s waiting for you. Let us give you this money, and let’s get going as quickly as possible.

And so, if you fire off, say, 20, 30, 50 of these emails, to highly relevant sites, you’ll get a whole bunch of responses. And then you can kind of triangulate. You could say, OK, well, 80% of the guys that responded to me said that they have this much traffic at a $5 CPM. So, the guys that are offering a $30 CPM you say, well, look all these other guys in your space have this ad rate. Your ad rate is not correct.

And so, you have a lot more leverage if you just send off a bunch of these and this is the email that I found gets the most responses. It’s sort of generic enough, especially with this part; it just says put me in touch with the right person. It’s generic enough to basically get across to small bloggers, to bigger sites that do ads sales. It has a high enough budget to get people interested. It shows that you’re willing to buy their traffic that’s unsold right now, especially international traffic.

And it’s a good fit for your audience, meaning that we’re a high-quality site. We’re going to provide value to your users, and it’s not going to be a spammy ad. It’s not going to be an ad that’s going to turn off your visitors from coming back to your site. And that’s something that a lot of publishers are very sensitive to, as I’m sure you know; especially if you say that I represent this site. I would actually probably say you can come . . .

Andrew: I see, by being very clear about the site it does help a lot. I get people who suspiciously say, I have a customer who wants to buy ads. And as I look at the email I’m thinking, I know what you want to do. You want to buy some kind of Viagra ad, with the right [??] text. All right, I want to save enough time to take a look at MixRank. Now, let’s bring up the website, and I’ll set this up this way. Tell me if I understand this right. People have been talking about you. I’ve been talking behind your back about this site. Here’s what we’ve gotten. It is this, you used to spy on other, well, not spy, but you used to check out where competitors were buying ads.

Where were people buying ads for the exact same thing that you were? And you’re figuring if they’re buying ads a lot, that means those sites are really effective. And so you said to yourself, huh, I bet I know this stuff. Some other affiliate marketers know this stuff. Let’s just systemize it and bring the rest of the world into our little quiet world that no one’s talking about and they don’t have to create crazy scripts. They don’t have to figure out the process on their own. They just go to one site; they type in their competitors’ website and boom. They know where they buy it. That’s the idea behind MixRank. We see where out competitors buy ads and then we go and buy those ads, too.

Ilya: Exactly. So basically, this whole process that I went through, I’ve done probably a hundred media buys; and every time I have to go through this long, arduous research process where I found this big list of publishers, but I wasn’t even sure if those are relevant, if those work. So what I realize is, well, I can just look at the big advertisers–the guys that have already spent a ton of money testing, and let’s see what works for them. Let’s see where they’re actively spending money every day and building campaigns. Let’s just advertise there. Here’s an example report for Coupons.com, going back to the coupon space ‘cuz I know there’s a lot of traffic there. Here are all of the text ads that they’re testing.

Andrew: So now, I can see the exact language that someone else in my space is using. Let’s take a look at the top of that screen there for a moment.

Ilya: Well, let’s actually look here. That’s even better. We can automatically identify what their highest performing ads are, what they’ve split tested, what’s actually taking off for right now, as this is.

Andrew: So, we see for example, in this case, free grocery coupons do well. But free coupons-print now does even better.

Ilya: Yeah.

Andrew: And that’s if we were going to do a coupon ad, that’s the way we want to write our ad.

Ilya: Exactly.

Andrew: That’s what we want to keep in mind.

Ilya: And the thing we’re looking at is that we’re looking at its position, that ad sense block, because if they have a good click through rate, or it’s highly relevant, they’re going to have a better position. And so, this ad’s average position is much better, and that’s why it’s taking off. And you can see that this is really good copy. It has a good call to action. It has a sense of immediacy and urgency.

And instead of me writing all these different headlines, and spending a ton of money testing to figure out what works, I would just basically look at what’s already working and do that. And the same thing for their banner ads. This is all the different banner ads that they’re tested. You could see exactly what design choices they’ve made.

Andrew: I don’t understand how this is possible. I don’t understand how this is right. I know that you’ve been vetted by good people, so it’s all good.

Ilya: I mean, it’s all publicly available information, so you could find all of this out there, right? You could go to those coupon sites and look manually. We’re basically just collecting it and aggregating it for you, and showing you, here’s exactly what’s working. We’re just collecting it, basically.

Andrew: So, if I was in the coupon space, and I wanted to know what kind of coupons to use to promote my site I’d say, look at this. General Mills . . .

Ilya: Yeah, they really test different foods to see which ones you like.

Andrew: Yeah, I don’t even have to test different foods. They tested it. I can see from this, cereal is worth my time to test. I can see in this that Pillsbury rolls are worth my time to test.

Ilya: And then one more piece of MixRank is this, which is probably the most valuable piece, which is the traffic sources. This is the exact publishers that they’re buying on traffic right now, effectively. Their ads have been appearing on for weeks straight; that they’re paying for traffic from every day and here’s what’s working for them. And you can see here the cereal [comps] right there. So, if I sell cereal, or if I’m selling coupons, that’s exactly where I would want to advertise. And so, you can just go and export a list of hundreds of these in seconds.

Andrew: And that is the Excel spreadsheet link right at the top. You don’t even have to create your own Excel spreadsheet to do this.

Ilya: There it is. So, that’s been the goal–to automate a lot of that media-buying process.

Andrew: So, this doesn’t take away the process that you just described to us right now?

Ilya: No, absolutely not. It’s far from comprehensive.

Andrew: But if you’re in this space, and you’ve got to see what your competitors are doing, you’ve got to see how your competitors are writing their ads.

Ilya: This is a good way to start, to get an overview of the market, and then you can go deeper and check out these sites manually, go find related sites on XMarks or Delicious or whatever. If you don’t know where to start you can go to a mix rink and see where to start and then go through the whole process that we discussed earlier to actually evaluate these sites and start negotiating buys and going through them.

Andrew: All right, let’s go to the top of the page and go back to the homepage. In fact let’s go back to MixRank.com.

Ilya: MixRank.com

Andrew: Do this guys, if you’re in the audience. First of all use everything in the session but the easiest thing that you can use, and this is in and out. This fits so perfectly with what we’re doing that we have to talk about it. We couldn’t have this conversation and leave out Google Analytics or leave out the software that serves up ads. We also can’t do this conversation and leave out MixRank. Can you bring up MixRank.com? Is it coming up on your screen because I don’t see it on mine? I just want to see the homepage.

Ilya: Oh, I see it.

Andrew: Oh, maybe things have frozen down. It froze. It froze at the perfect time. We’ll leave it up to the audience. Go to MixRank.com. Type in your competitor’s name. Just do it for fun. Just do it to see what others are up to and it’s going to blow your mind. Use everything that you’ve done here and let me, and let Ilya know what you guys have been able to do. We’ve love to hear your feedback. We’d love to hear your progress.

Ilya: We can also definitely put out my email. If anyone has any more questions about this or wants me to look at their specific case or anything I would be really happy to do this. I posted something on hacker news sometime ago where I offered to help anyone with their ad campaign and I had about 150 start ups email me and I got back to every single one of them with really useful, actionable advice for how to get more traffic. I love doing this stuff. I love helping start ups and learning about your campaigns and all that. Please email me, Ilya@mixrank.com, any time and I’ll be happy to help.

Andrew: Thank you. Thank you, Ilya, for walking us through all this. Thank you guys all for being a part of this course. Go use it, give us your feedback and of course contact Ilya and check out MixRank.com. Bye.

Andrew: Hi everyone. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. When Matt Ellsworth, who is the course facilitator at Mixergy, pitched me on this idea, I said, “Facebook? I’m not sure there’s enough there…” Then he started walking me through the tactics that you’re about to learn in this course, and I said, “Matt, we have to clear the whole course agenda, and get to this right away.”

I had no idea that all of this was possible. Matt, of course, did. He gets social in a way that most people aren’t even aware of yet. Matt does business development and product strategy at 8th Bridge. Merchants partner with 8th Bridge to create social shopping experiences for their customers within Facebook and on their eCommerce sites. Matt will be facilitating this course, and, Matt, take it away.

Matt: Thanks, Andrew, for the great introduction. Like Andrew said, my name is Matt Ellsworth. I’m here with one of my good friends, Lou Abramowski. Say hi to the people, Lou.

Lou: Hey people.

Matt: We are here today to teach you about Facebook. We deal with Facebook on a daily basis here at 8th Bridge. We’re also going to talk to you about some of the things that Lou does outside of 8th Bridge to enhance your Facebook experience for your web business, or just your personal brand. We’ll probably get a little bit more into how you can use that individually.

What we’re going to do is go through the agenda that you see here on the screen, in the Google doc here, and make sure we cover all the different items that are important to you guys. We’ll start off in the Facebook super powers section. We just want to tell you that with this conversation with myself and Lou, you’re going to be learning a lot. You’re going to learn how to grow your audience, and how to bootstrap your Facebook marketing.

What we mean by that is all of these strategies, besides some of the bonus strategies, are free. All they take is you implementing them inside of Facebook, and they don’t require any marketing dollars. We’re also going to teach you how to monetize your Facebook presence, which is what we do at 8th Bridge on a daily basis.

At this point, what I’d like to do is turn it over to Lou for a slight introduction, and then we’ll get into the story of how Lou met Twig the Fairy.

Lou: Hey everyone. My name is Lou Abramowski. I’m a co-founder here at 8th Bridge, so I’ve been working on Facebook commerce for probably the better part of three years now. 8th Bridge was actually the first company ever to put a store inside of Facebook.

At the time, I don’t think we really even realized what we were getting ourselves into. It was pretty exciting, but me personally, I’ve been bleeding blue since about the time Facebook launched in 2004. I wear my Facebook t-shirt, I think, on a weekly basis. When we started going with portable storefronts, I knew the obvious path right away was to get into Facebook.

The minute we launched it, it really propelled our business into something a lot more than we realized we were going to be getting into. Since that launch, with 1-800-Flowers back in 2009, we have launched some really premier clients like Hallmark, a big player in the flash deals market, Haute Look…

Matt: Recently acquired by Nordstrom.

Lou: …Brooks Brothers…

Matt: Delta Airlines.

Lou: …Delta Airlines, may be our flagship at this point, some real serious clients that are on our client list. While 8th Bridge probably isn’t going to help anybody other than the audience, it might be something really interesting for you to take a look at 8thbridge.com, and look at the client list, and look at the services we have to offer. Check out the really cool things that are happening inside of social commerce, particularly on the Facebook platform. It’s a really exciting space, and we’re pretty proud to be in it. Getting to work inside of Facebook every single day is a dream come true, really.

Matt: One note that I’d like to make is, like Andrew said, I do business development for 8th Bridge, so I’m constantly bringing Lou in to discuss these same strategies that we’re about to present to you today. So literally this is the exact same thing that we would be working with Delta Airlines on or 1-800-Flowers on or any of these other enterprise class brands, these billion dollar companies. These same strategies will work for your small business as they will for a big business, or even an enterprise level company.

With that, let’s get into the story here. Lou, why don’t you talk a little bit about who Twig the Fairy is, and what it has to do with the course that we’re about to do today.

Lou: The Twig the Fairy in my environment, first and foremost, is my girlfriend, her real name is Kathy. Twig the Fairy is a children’s performer that travels all around the country, performing at Renaissance festivals. She spends about ten months flying in and out of cities all around the country to do performances on the street at Renaissance festivals. Mostly for children, and for the parents of those children, or just people who kind of have a childlike spirit about them.

We’ve been dating a little now over two years now. Its funny because when we first began dating, I didn’t really know what she did, other than the fact that she was a children’s performer. When I found out that she was a fairy, I honestly said the words to her, ‘The fairy thing is really cute, but you know you’re going to have to get a real job someday.’ [laughs]. Somehow our relationship survived [laughs] past that.

Matt: It was just barely.

Lou: Yeah. I did eventually get to see her perform, and at that point, I realized just how incredibly talented she is. It also kind of coincided also with the launch of the Facebook page’s product a couple of years ago. At the time, I think she had something close to about 3,000 friends on MySpace, but she didn’t ever really communicate with them.

One of the things I did is actually on the exact date that the Facebook page’s product launched, I opened up a Twig the Fairy page for her, and we kind of let it sit. We had begun talking about working on marketing for her character together. Later on, we came back to the Facebook page only to realize even though we’ve never told anybody about it, I think something close to a thousand people had already connected with her page. We hadn’t done any marketing. The fact that my realization coincided with the Facebook page’s product, and the fact that it was spreading really virally in Facebook without too much effort, made me think that we could do some really, really exciting things.

At that point, Kathy and I, or Twig and I, decided to really put some effort into figuring out how best we could start tackling communicating and connecting with her audience in a much different way. It’s also kind of important to note that Twig’s real character, in person, doesn’t speak. When she’s performing, she actually never speaks a single word, and only communicates through a kind of physicality and movement. So opening up in Facebook was really, really a challenge to begin with because it was the first time where she could actually speak to her audience directly.

Matt: That’s to set the stage of the story while we’re focusing a lot on the Twig the Fairy page, and why Lou is considered a Facebook fairy wrangler. The other thing that I want to highlight, because I’m close with both Lou and Kathy, or Twig, is why don’t you just talk a little bit about where Twig was at the point when you opened up the Facebook page, as a performer in her career.

Lou: That’s a good point. One of the things that was putting me in this frame of thought that she had to put the fairy thing behind her was that she was literally living in poverty. As she would travel out to these Renaissance festivals, she would live without running water, without heat, and in these trailers, or even in some locations just a tent, with a shared bathroom area. That probably comes as no surprise to some people who are familiar with Renaissance festivals. That’s where she was a little over two years ago. Not even getting a hot shower on a regular basis. I think we’ll talk a little bit about where she’s at today.

Matt: The message of inspiration for all of you web entrepreneurs that are out there living in a tent, without running water, pay attention. Let’s get into a little more of the hot and heavy details here. Let’s talk about why Facebook. With Facebook, we’ll start with MAU, monthly active users. Why is that important?

Lou: Yeah, you know, there are so many things that we could talk about regarding Facebook, and how it’s important. I don’t think a lot of them would come as a surprise. One of the things that I don’t think a lot of people really realize is that, although you may have 100,000 people connected to your page on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that you’re actually sending out messages into the news feeds of all of those people.

The number that actually matters is your monthly active user’s number, which is accessible in the Facebook Insights. I’m sure anybody who has used a Facebook page has seen that. You can just go to facebook.com/insights and navigate your way through to find your monthly active user’s number. The reason that is important is that’s truly a gauge of how many people are interacting with your content, and actually consuming your content, on a monthly basis.

I’m sure a lot of you have seen really, really large pages with millions of people connected with the page. They’ll make a post, and you’ll notice that maybe they only get 100 or 200 comments or likes out of the three or four million people on their page. The reason for that is their MAU count is down.

I think what we’re going to talk a lot about today is mechanisms and techniques that you can use to boost that MAU number, particularly for those people who are spending money on advertising, or putting in more than just sweat equity into growing their fan base. It’s really important to maintain that MAU count high, to maintain that you have some sort of channel of communication with the people who have connected to your page.

Matt: Obviously, MAU is really, really important, after that explanation from Lou. What we’re going to share with you next are just a couple of stories of what’s been possible for Twig with Facebook. In the meantime, you may want to go to facebook.com/twigthefairy. If you haven’t already liked Twig, you’ll probably get this little sad face here, which is one of the strategies that you can employ in the future.

Once you click like, you’ll be able to kind of take a look at the page, and see how passionate Twig’s fans are. If you want to take the time while we’re talking about these stories, maybe even get your own fairy name. It’s pretty cute. It’s a lot of fun. I’ll actually go through the process of getting one of these so you can just see what that’s like while Lou talks a little bit about this first story here, which is $27,000-plus in donations, in only two weeks, and that occurred on Facebook, right, Lou?

Lou: Yeah, we did everything on Facebook, and took the contributions via PayPal. It’s been a lifelong dream for my girlfriend to release a children’s book. We didn’t really know the best way to go about it, because it turns out that putting together a book costs quite a bit of money. What we wanted to do was make sure that whatever we were going to put out was really consistent with the Twig brand in excellence. Also, we didn’t want to just put something out on Hulu and price it really high.

What we wanted to do was something a little bit more community-oriented and have a little bit of fun with it. What we did is launched our own kick-starter campaign that we solicited contributions to the project prior to doing any printing or any preparation for the book. We just told people, “If you love Twig, here are your options. You can donate on multiple different levels, and be part of the book, and call yourself a producer of the book by making these donations.”

What we did was launched this kind of campaign that went on for about two weeks on Facebook, asking people to make donations, communicating with them regularly about the progress of the project. We ended up landing roughly around $27,000 in donations in those two weeks, and eventually did end up making the book and getting out in time for Christmas.

Matt: Yeah it was an incredible story, watching it unfold. I also got my book by the time Christmas started, so I was pretty happy about that. One of the next stories that kind of astonished me was the story about the calendar sales that you guys did shortly falling after the donations. I’m shocked a little bit about that.

Lou: Well, headed into December we knew that one of the other Twig products was just a wall calendar with some Twig photography on it. Headed into the month we knew that we had a ton of books to deliver from all the people who had made donations. We knew that we just weren’t going to have the bandwidth to package up and deliver all of these books and a ton of sales.

What we set for ourselves, the goal for the month was to sell about $3,000 worth of calendars through Facebook exclusively. We kind of put together this campaign to post multiple times throughout the month with different types of promotions and as Christmas approach make them a little bit more aggressive. It turns out that in one single post on Facebook, we ended up generating $6,000 in sale, which was double our goal and probably what was double our bandwidth.

We ended up, I think, staying up for about 48 consecutive hours to make sure everybody got their shipments in time for Christmas, but it was pretty exciting to see the response on Facebook.

Matt: It’s good old fashioned hard work, folks.

Lou: Mm-hmm.

Matt: All right. Let’s talk about just briefly a little about where you’re at today in Facebook, Lou, and then we’re going to get into the stuff that everybody’s waiting for which is the advice on how to replicate the success that you guys have had in Facebook.

Lou: We’re just on the doorstep of 200,000 likes for Twig the Fairy. Every single day that number grows by kind of variable a month between hundreds or thousands. Her audiences now out at the Renaissance Festivals think of her as a genuine celebrity. We’ve come across people as we’ve gone to other Renaissance Festivals in other areas, just kind of on the street and had people treat her like a genuine celebrity.

We actually had a moment where somebody starting tearing up and couldn’t speak. My girlfriend’s been really, really great about it and handled the situation really, really well, but it’s affecting kind of her day-to-day performances, and it’s also affecting sales at the cart. She has merchandise carts at a lot of the places that she performs at, in a merchandise booth.

Matt: Not only that, but it also effects what they pay her to come their festivals, right?

Lou: Yep, and her contract values have skyrocketed since this audience has been built and obviously traffic to her website. The times that we are kind of pushing products, we always kind of see an overwhelming response to people trying to get the products. The reality is that now we’re actually unable to keep up technically with the production and fulfillment and just keeping the products up to date on her website and making them available for sale, so that’s kind of my wrap today.

Andrew: OK, that’s fantastic. What you should’ve got so far is that Facebook is real people. If there’s any other Andrew Warner’s out there, believe, believe. Let’s get into it. As you can see point E here is what we’re really trying to stress which is that you should start today. The first item on the list, first strategy, post every single day.

This is kind of Gary Vaynerchuk thing as well when it applies to Blogging, Twitter and all kinds of different things. Let’s talk a little bit about why it’s important to post everyday on Facebook.

Lou: Yeah, I think I might start just by saying that there are a lot of people out there giving, I think in my opinion, really bad advice about trying to avoid annoying your audience by posting every single day. The reality is that posting every single day is incredibly important to keep your audience engaged because Facebook calculates this new speed kind of optimization and new speed affinity between pages and users.

The stronger that affinity between a page and user, the more often that page’s content get showed to that user inside the news feed. It’s incredibly important that you post every single day. For the, I guess scientist out in the audience, you can kind of experiment with this yourself, but you’ll notice that on the days where you do not post, and you go and look at your active monthly users number change on that day, you will almost invariably see that your MAU, or your monthly active users, number will go down.

Although Facebook doesn’t expose or give any information about its algorithm for deciding this news feed optimization algorithm, the reality is that after 24, your affinity with pages starts to decrease if you haven’t been shown a post, liked a post, or commented on it. The reality is that you need to post every single day in order to maintain that active monthly users number. What you want to do is post every day, and garner interactions with comments and likes from people.

Matt: That’s important here. The next point we have here is about posting engaging content. Let’s talk a little bit about a framework for posting engaging content. What types of things should we consider when we’re making a post? I’ve bought into posting every day, now what?

Lou: This isn’t new information. Anybody who reads anything from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan, and I’m sure the stuff from Andrew, too, kind of reinforces that original content is the most important thing that you can do. By supplying other people’s content, you’re really not delivering something new. What you want to do is communicate to anybody that’s connected with your page the value that they’re getting by connecting with your page, and they’re going to get content they can’t find anywhere else on the Internet.

It’s something kind of important to think about as you’re posting every single day. In what I am about to put out to all of my fans and all of the people that have connected with my page in it really interesting, and is it something that they couldn’t have found anywhere else? Is it kind of fun and engaging?

Matt: So, say a fairy were to type a message, while flying upside down, would that be considered original content, or can you find that on Mixergy.com?

Lou: [laughs] I don’t think there’s a ton of fairy content on Mixergy.com.

Matt: Not yet.

Lou: Not yet. Maybe…

Matt: Not yet. After this course, maybe.

Lou: …yeah.

Matt: That’s a great example there of working humor into a post, and I think you guys do that a lot. One thing the people should notice here is that 1463 people have taken time out of their day to like this specific post. There are 209 comments on this one single post. Obviously, that’s an effective method, as well, to post something original.

Lou: On the humor front, too, I’d like to add one more thing with that. The advice I often give with this is that you try to recognize the fact that you’re in Facebook, and appreciate the medium that you’re in. This type of humor won’t translate over the phone, or on a pamphlet at a storefront, or on a sign outside the wall. But this upside down text, it’s like textual humor, works better because of the environment that it’s in. This is true for the example that we’re giving here.

One of the other kind of funny posts that we’ve used a couple other times that’s along these lines is we’ve posted something about submitting a Facebook feature request, to add the ‘glitterific’ button. People have responded really well with it because they realize that this is a piece of content that was written specifically for them in the environment that they’re reading it. It doesn’t seem like there’s some sort of a robot operating the page. It actually feels like there is a human being behind it. Just by recognizing and thinking a little bit about where you’re posting, and how you can use that environment to better communicate where you are, I think, really works well, particularly for humor.

Matt: There’s some buzz in the street this year about F8, Facebook’s big conference, and the glitterific button?

Lou: [laughs] Yes, Mark Zuckerberg’s announcing it.

Matt: OK. Good. Perfect. Well, let’s move on to the next item here, which is not what you would typically think. Lou says links stink, but I’m still skeptical.

Lou: One of the things that we noticed, really early on, is that by sharing hyperlinks, inside the news feed, we almost invariably lower our interaction rate. So, what we find, is that by comparison to all of our other posts, our like count and our comment count was always just abysmal, compared to the rest of the post. I came to the realization that people are very hesitant to click the like button, or comment, before they’ve actually visited the content that you’re sharing. On top of that, they’re very unlikely to come back to that exact post, to provide their two cents or click the like button after they left Facebook altogether.

The third one is really more about my gut telling me that people tend not to want to leave Facebook when they’re in Facebook. I tested this method by ending copy with the words, “without leaving Facebook,” and it always converts better on a click-through rate, when I include the words, “without leaving Facebook.”

I think any sort of visual or copy that communicates to the user that they’re not leaving Facebook, will almost always help Facebook users to get a little more engaged, and links, communicate the exact opposite, particularly the example we are showing here with Dexter. You can see, side-by-side for comparison, where Dexter is sharing this quote from one of their shows, versus the link above it, and you can see they’re getting 15% of the interaction rate, on one versus the other.

I see this over and over and over, and it impacts our monthly active users as well. So, I’ve had conversations with people that are behind the news feed EdgeRank, that algorithm decides what shows up there, and they told me that the link click-throughs do count toward EdgeRank, that news feed algorithm, but I have yet to see it anecdotally, or through any sort of experimentation, because when I post links, my monthly active user count definitely does not go up.

Matt: OK. Great. By the way, I am excited for the next season of Dexter. That is going to be really, really good. OK. Moving onto number three. Let’s talk about Cameo Power. This is one of my personal favorites.

Lou: We started doing this, I think, with Twig, maybe a year and change ago. I guess I don’t really have a story behind it, but the bottom line is, I realized that, by far the most popular application inside of Facebook. Facebook is the biggest photo-sharing website on the entire web, and it has been for a very, very long time. Facebook says, over and over, that the reason for that is because of the tagging feature. One of the things that we realized, that people were doing with Twig, for awhile, actually, was tagging themselves in Twig’s pictures.

So, they were finding some sort of connection with Twig, beyond just trying to read her content, and just consume everything that she was posting. They also wanted to, in some way, represent themselves with Twig. So, one of the other things about my girlfriend is she’s incredibly expressive. And, you can imagine, as a character who doesn’t speak, she needs to be.

So, one of the things that we started experimenting with was putting up a bunch of pictures, with a bunch of different expressions, and with that, we started doing this Fairy Friday thing. For a very long time now, we’ve been posting three images. Each image, itself, has, I think, in this one there is 12, anywhere from 12 to 25 or so images, and we give the users a call to action, and we present this call to action for people to tag themselves into the photo.

Matt: How many people can tag themselves in a photo?

Lou: Each photo has a limit of 50 tags. It’s really funny with Twig, because we post 3 photos every week and 150 fill up in minutes, if not seconds.

Matt: It is incredible.

Lou: You can see here people have an opportunity to express themselves just by tagging themselves at the location for the photo. That kind of represents how their day is going. Every single week, we get comments about how people are sad that they never make it into Fairy Friday, and they wish that there were more images there every Friday so that they didn’t miss it, or that it was at a different time of day.

The real beauty is being able to add a little bit more enjoyment to their day, and a little bit more fun on Facebook than, I think, they usually have. The exciting thing for the audience out there is that this is a tremendous marketing opportunity. I don’t think there is any better way to do this actually. Because all of these people that are tagging themselves in this photo are actually giving this photo an opportunity to show up in their friends’ news feeds. So what that means is that if Matt and I are friends, and Matt does not like Twig the Fairy, and I tag myself in one of Twig’s photos here, Matt can now see Twig content in his news feed even though he has never connected with Twig the Fairy.

Its really, really powerful technique. Not only will that potentially show up in the news feed, its forever in their photo album until they untag themselves. Which I can tell you never ever happens. Over the course of the year and change – I’m not even sure how long we’ve been doing this – thousands and thousands of people have tagged themselves in these photos. If you multiply that by 140 people each, the average number of friends at 140 people, we’re talking probably in the millions for the potential reach for this.

What we’ve done in each one of these photos is actually included some branding. You might have noticed that the words, ‘Twig the Fairy’, and the URL, “facebook.com/twig the fairy”, appear in these images. We’ve really used this as a branding opportunity, in the middle of this fun little thing that we give people every Friday.

Andrew: Lou, Seth in the audience is asking about how this would apply to a business. He’s saying that Twig is a very compelling character in concept, but for a business online that doesn’t have such an expressive front person, how do you use these photos properly?

Lou: That’s a really, really great question. The way that I’ve done this, and I’ve seen other people do this very successfully, for something that isn’t necessarily as fun of a brand, is we’ve asked people to create polls. In particular, what you might want to do here is post three images of your products. Maybe, you’ve got three products that you’re really excited to tell your fans about. You post a photo album with those three products in it, and then you ask your fans to tag themselves in their favorite of the three products. I think that’s probably the best way I’ve seen that applied.

Andrew: Yes. You can see that.

Lou: It’s really funny because I’ve heard that from other business owners, too. Once they start doing this, and they do this regularly, and they condition their fans to tag themselves in these photos, what they’ll find is that their fans will start tagging themselves in photos that they never asked them to tag themselves in. That’s when you know you’ve really engaged your audience, when they start taking actions to promote your brand without you asking them to.

Matt: Another use that we’ve talked to a couple of other brands about doing is, say, you’re selling products, web apps, whatever you’re selling. You could have people click to tag themselves in their favorite product, and then the first 50 that tag themselves, you’ll actually personally send them a message in their Facebook inbox with a promo code, some sort of savings, some sort of deal, or a message that lets them know you’re thanking them. It becomes a really warm, warm message to send somebody. They feel connected to your page, and connected to your business. That’s something that we’ve seen used in the past, as well. Way back, a long time ago IKEA used it in some types of promotions.

Lou: Back when, I think, there were Facebook promotions that policies that restricted the use of this kind of feature to win stuff. But, yeah, and then I think there is one other way that I’ve seen this used pretty successfully, and it’s kind of in a Where’s Waldo? scene. So I’ve seen people post images like this, and because Facebook’s photo tagging is actually kind of spatial association, along with just the tagging of the entire photo. One cool thing I’ve seen is just interesting photos where people are asked to tag themselves inside the area of interest, you know, maybe it’s just a Where’s Waldo? picture. But I can imagine some people in the audience doing some really, really creative things around that. That can be very exciting.

Andrew: All right. I see. Some of the questions that people are asking have to do with points that I know you’re going to bring up in the future. That’s why if you guys are seeing that I’m not asking them right now, I want to leave them for the section of the course when Matt and Lou will be talking about them.

Matt: So one more thing, I think this isa great way to segue with this photo tagging [??] being a big call to action. Why don’t we talk about the magic of call to action, as you call it, Lou?

Lou: Can we stick with this forâ?¦

Matt: Yeah, no problem.

Lou:…just one more second because I did want to kind of bring up this…Is it okay if we talk about the crowd sourcing and stuff?

Matt: Yeah, go ahead.

Lou: So, you know, in particular, one of the really cool ways to do this also is to ask your fans to start submitting photos of themselves, maybe using a product or just generally doing something that’s relevant to your business. And what you can do is then in some sense you are kind of taking a little bit of the responsibility off your shoulders to produce, kind of, brand new content and you become more of a content curator in taking other people’s content.

So what you can see here, what Matt’s showing, is another page there run where on a weekly basis people send themselves pictures of themselves playing Ultimate Frisbee, and on Friday I post three of the most interesting ones. And this is really exciting, too, because people are submitting their own photos. They find themselves tagging themselves in the photos too, or identifying some friends that they might see that might be interested in the photo, or doing similar things in tagging themselves. So, it’s another kind of viral opportunity to reach the friends of your fans.

Matt: And if you guys want to do your own Where’s Waldo?, you can go add the Ultimate page later on and try to find the embarrassing photo of me in Dominator Friday from weeks past.

Andrew: What’s the URL on that?

Lou: It’s facebook.com/theultimatepage.

Andrew: I see it now on the screen.

Matt: And the links will be shared later in the document as well. OK. Anything else on crowd sourcing content, Lou, that you want to address before we move on?

Lou: No. I think that’s good.

Matt: OK. Perfect. So, the magic call to action.

Lou: Yeah, so, you know, this is something that’s really simple and I don’t think it needs much explanation, really, but other than I think a lot of people are kind of afraid to use language like the words, “click like if” followed by a statement. Because they feel like it kind of cheapens their brand or it feels kind of desperate. And I guess that’s fine if you’re incredibly brand conscious. If you’re talking about really some of the most elitist, I guess, brands in the world, then maybe there’s, you know, some concern there.

But the reality is that this is incredibly, incredibly effective. And you can see, I think we’ll go through several examples here, but it is incredibly rare where this would not work. I can’t think of a scenario, actually, where this would not boost your interaction rates. And I’ve done A/B testing where I’ve posted the exact same piece of content, one was just the statement by itself, and the other one was using something like, “click like if” followed by the statement. And every single time using the words “click like” as a call to action or giving just generally the call to action to the users to click the “like” button will invariably boost your interaction rates.

Matt: I think this one is particularly incredible and it’s five words. It says, “click like if you believe” and almost 5,000 people have liked this.

Andrew: I was thinking that same thing, too. That’s amazing. Just adding two words to that magic intro gets 5,000 people to hit like. Considering what you said earlier about what happens when someone does hit like, and how they’re much more likely to see your content, that is especially incredible. I made a note of that, too.

Lou: Later this weekend, I’m going to want to click like if I’m an ambitious upstart.

Andrew: I’m actually taking notes here as we do this, because I know that everyone wants to “Does this work, and if it does work, will it work for Andrew? If its not working for Andrew, then what is wrong with this?” I want them to see, on my site, in my Facebook fan page, how all these ideas work. I want to prove to them that these ideas work by using them myself.

Matt: Perfect.

Andrew: I see Derek in the audience, and he’s saying that he’s loving this. Thank you, and thank you right back, Derek.

Matt: Derek, we’re glad you believe, man.

Lou: Find that like button. Maybe one more last point on this, and not to beat a dead horse, but by comparison, the other way to go about stating that same post would be “Do you believe?”, and had I posted that, or had Twig posted that, “Do you believe”, I assure you the interaction rates wouldn’t have gone over 10%. I’m sure that we got literally a 10x lift in the number of interactions just by rephrasing it in a way that all people had to do was click their mouse button once.

We’ve experimented with using the same language in a couple of different ways. This is another really effective way to do it if the click like thing doesn’t work. I use this one over and over, too. I make the statement, I follow it by two line breaks or two carriage returns, and then in parentheses I say, ‘We recommend you like this’. Maybe, in Andrew’s case, you use, “I recommend you like this.” Speak in a language that the audience understands. Just by giving that extra call to action there, it’s very effective. In fact, I think I’ve used, over and over, the simple posts that entirely read just the word, “Friday”, and underneath it, in parentheses, “We recommend you like this.”, and its incredibly, highly interactive.

Matt: It turns out people like Friday.

Andrew: Jason in the audience is asking what number should you be shooting for when it comes to likes, impressions, and feedback.

Matt: That’s a really good question.

Lou: That’s a great question. As far as a percentage goes, I think if you’re getting into the range of 50-60% of all of the people who have connected with your page are in your monthly active users number, I think you’re doing a really great job. Let me just do a quick calculation here.

Twig, for example, I think is one of the highest percentage MAUs to actual likes. Of course, I don’t have access to a lot of the bigger pages, but for pages that are sitting with 200,000+ likes on their page, I regularly see Twig out-performing those ones with three or four thousand. Just to give you an idea, her monthly active user account today is at 110,000 of the 195,000 that she has.

Andrew: 110,000 out of 195,000 people who are fans of her, 110,000 took some kind of action or interacted with Twig the Fairy?

Lou: In the last month, yes.

Andrew: In the last month. Is it too personal to ask to see that page on Matt’s computer?

Lou: I’d have to log in here. Let’s see. Are you logged in right now?

Andrew: I’ll tell you what, if you have to log him out, maybe we can come back to it afterwards. After we’re done with the presentation.

Matt: I think maybe we’ll add me as an admin, and then I can actually just use my profile to get on. Then he can take me off later so that I can’t steal all of the fairy secrets.

Andrew: Well, I don’t want to interrupt the flow if you guys want to move on to the next point, but I’m going to add it here to the list of questions that people have been coming up with during the session.

Matt: That’s great. Keep the great questions coming, people. We want this to be interactive, as well. Hopefully, you’re having a good time so far.

Lou: Can I just say one more thing about that last question that came through? In terms of impressions and interaction rates, my goal with Twig right now is to have the impressions hit about 100,000 impressions for every single post that she has. That number fluctuates a lot because I think Facebook does tweak that news feed optimization EdgeRank algorithm quite a bit. Month to month we see drastic fluctuations in that number.

Some days, we’ll just be feeling great and that number is really, really high–and we’ve seen it get as high, literally, as 3 or 400,000 impressions per post. But now, the number really sits more around 120,000 per post. That’s kind of where we’re at in terms of impressions. Then I really try to make sure that we’re getting somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1.5 to 2%, I think, for interaction rates. That would mean if there are 100,000 impressions of it, I consider a really successful post about 2,000 comments and likes.

Matt: That brings up a thought of mine that we’ve talked about this before and it doesn’t have to do with the next point, it’s kind of in general with these strategies, so there are smaller pages out there and some of the audience members may be opening up their page for the first time and they might get discouraged at first. Are those numbers in the beginning for a smaller page indicative of their future success or is it a “keep going and plow through it” type thing that you’re going to have to do to see the type of interaction that you’re talking about?

Lou: I think for the smaller pages it actually seems to be a little bit easier to get higher interaction rates and a higher monthly active user number and as your page grows, it’s harder to maintain those higher percentages. I think there’s this balancing point where you pass the 500 “likes” mark all the way up to 10,000 and it seems like you’re just very confident and you’re connecting with almost everybody on the page, but as the fan base grows it gets harder to maintain that large percentage.

I don’t really have a great answer for that, but I have, in my own experience, I run several pages that are just 2 or 3,000 and the interaction rates tend to be much, much higher and the monthly active users tend to be much, much higher as a percentage of the total likes.

Andrew: So I want to keep this moving, but I have to tell you that Seth Price in the audience just tried the “click like if” idea as we were talking. He said, “I just posted ‘click life if’ and filled in the blanks and immediately someone liked it.” And he says, “I only have 345 ‘likes’ in total on my page.” So immediately, even with a small audience, he was able to get a response.

Lou: Who did that?

Andrew: That is Seth in the audience, who is testing out these ideas in real time for us. Thanks, Seth.

Matt: Awesome. Perfect.

Lou: This is a little off agenda, too, but this is one of the beauties of Facebook, right? There really isn’t an easier medium to push out content so immediately and test things out so immediately. It’s really a fun place to do that kind of stuff.

Matt: Lou has made me an admin so we’ll dive just real quickly into–do we want to go into Insights Blue or where do you want to go–I’ll let Lou drive for a second.

Lou: So you can just kind of see the summary up here. Close that there. In the upper right-hand corner there’s an inside summary here showing the monthly active users and you can see that on a daily basis. I think that represents either yesterday or two days ago. In Facebook Insights there’s about a 24 to 48 hour delay on the data that’s coming through, but you can see that 110,000 people are in the monthly active users bucket. I’ve got about 300 new “likes” yesterday. There are 62,000 daily post views, and I think that might actually be uniques. I don’t think that’s impressions. Then the post feedback says 400, and I don’t know what that represents but I don’t think we’ve had a day under 1,000 any time recently.

Matt: Another interesting thing I’m seeing there is “from recommended pages” and you get to see how many of your fans like certain other things. It looks like 54,000 of your fans like Lady Gaga. Do you think there’s a collaboration potential there with Lady Gaga and Twig the Fairy?

Lou: Well, no, but it could be a good storybook. You joke about it but I have used this information to guide the content better, so what I share.

Matt: I think if you were to look at all these different things, you could tell what your audience is interested in.

Andrew: Oh, that’s interesting. So, I guess we could even say that if we see that our audience likes Starbucks or South Park or, in this case, what do we see, True Blood, we can do a question, or we can say click like if you like True Blood, or click like if you’re a fan of Starbucks or Coca-Cola or whatever else they’re into, according to this page. I can see how that would be really useful.

Lou: Yeah. I think with Twig we made some comment. I think it was something like, I’m not sure who this Lady Gaga person is, but if she thinks she’s getting my glitter, good luck or something like that.

Matt: So, you probably won’t be making any Charlie Sheen and fairy dust comments though, will you?

Lou: I don’t think there’s any Charlie Sheen in there.

Andrew: I see Derek again in the audience. He’s saying, with all these ideas, you are giving him specific action. He’s saying, with all these ideas we can now implement a strategy for what to post over the next two to three months. And that will ensure good content. He’s saying, that’s great stuff.

Lou: Thanks for the great feedback.

Matt: Yeah, that’s great feedback, but just so you know, Lou’s been using these for two years. So, three to four months, you can literally reuse these ideas constantly because all you have to do is plug in new content.

Andrew: I see, so you are saying it’s not just two or three months’ worth of content. You just keep recycling the basic techniques.

Matt: How is that for not letting somebody complement you. No, really, seriously folks, thank you so much for the feedback. Let’s keep moving along, we have a lot more great stuff to share with you here.

So this next one is a little bit similar to the magic call to action. It’s called action in itself. But, to fill in the blank, why don’t you talk just a little bit briefly about why this is different than the call to action. This is more geared towards comments, right?

Lou: Yeah, this is more geared towards comments. And, you know, in my experience I’ve found that comments just anecdotally have a tendency to reach the news feed virally for the friends of your fans better than likes do. I think likes do show up in the friends of fans occasionally. But comments in particular, I think just mean so much more because there is so much more effort into typing some sort of an answer then there is just lifting their forefinger to click the button. So, I think, fundamentally it is different and more powerful to get comments then it is to get likes. But, I think also, it is a little bit harder to get comments. These two mechanisms coming up here are the ones that I’ve found to be the best way to solicit comments from users.

Matt: Andrew, I want to see a post on Mixergy’s page that says, this week I’m going to interview blank. And you let people decide who you want that next interview to be.

Andrew: Okay.

Lou: Yeah, I think that that would be more effective than just asking an open ended question. And I’ll get in to that a little bit later. But I think that’s a really good idea, Matt.

Matt: Yeah, and so, lets just take a look here real quick. This is one of my favorite screenshot examples that we have because of how similar the posts are. It doesn’t get a lot closer than this to an A/B test right in front of you. So, if you look at the top post it says, the best looking players make the best ultimate players. And then below, it says, the best blank players make the best ultimate players. And, as you can see, it goes from 32 comments up to 233 comments because you’re giving people a way to interact and to find themselves. So, as far as A/B testing goes, the proof is in the pudding right there.

Andrew: So, one more question for the audience related to this. Matt is wanting to hold us accountable for this and make sure this relates to smaller businesses in addition to national brands. Sorry, Mike, Mike in the audience. So, how would this relate to a local business?

Lou: You know, that’s a good question and I think it would vary from business to business. But, I can imagine somebody who runs an ice cream shop and maybe it’s a hot day out. It’s a 95 degree day out and it’s humid, and a post that might make sense is something like, on hot and humid days the most refreshing flavor of ice cream is blank. And the reason I say that, is that when you ask an open ended question, and you could rephrase it that way. You could rephrase it, what’s you favorite flavor to get on a hot summer day. I don’t find that the interaction rates are as great as just posting this kind of “fill in the blank” type style post.

Andrew: Ah, interesting.

Lou: So that many people might want to use it for a local business, I’m not sure what Mike’s business is.

Matt: Take some relevant things from around you, take some things from your local environment. There’s got to be some business that has a ridiculous slogan nearby that you can take one of the words out and do a fill in the blank for the slogan or, maybe it’s the town motto or something like that or it has to do specifically with your business. You can take all types of things from the environment around you, If it’s local, just focus on local things.

Lou: I think a good process, too, for yourselves is to say, “I want to get some feedback from my customers and from my fans” and this is the question I would ask and write down the question and say, “How can I rephrase this in a way that I can make it a fill in the bank type of post”. And then from there try to also phrase it so that the fill in the blank is not some big sentence that people would have to write, but it’s an answer that would be a single word.

The simpler you make it for people to interact, the more likely they are to do it. So, the way that you frame the fill in the blank statement is in a way that they only have to type one word to fill in the blank, I think it’s a very, very powerful mechanism to get some really important and valuable feedback from your fans as well as boosting their interactions.

Andrew: All right. Now, Mike is asking. . I guess you answered his question with that answer, but so now he’s asking: how do we make money with this and we’re going to get to that. I see that there are a few people in the audience who are actually trying this in real time. I’m coming up with all kinds of ideas of how I would use it on my page on Facebook, but I can’t leave the chat room and can’t leave the session.

If you’re watching us, you can leave and you can go into Facebook right now and try these ideas right now in real time and do like Seth and Derek and Kevin and some of the others. Kevin is actually running this right now and telling me in the chat room what his feedback is or giving me a sense of what the feedback is. Do the same thing yourselves. Try it and come back in here.

Oh good, someone says, click “like” if you want to go to China. I got one person within a few minutes, within three minutes. So, yeah, some people are trying it. Keep trying it and keep giving me feedback. And better still, just see it for yourself in action. It’s so much more powerful when you see it on your own page than when you just hear us talk about it here

Matt: I know for a fact there’s some people in the room that run some pretty gigantic pages. So, people running the big pages, don’t be afraid to test some things out. Nobody puts baby in the blank. [laughs].

Lou: Incidentally, not to get off track here, but the China thing just brought up an interesting way that you might use the photo tagging thing for, maybe some people who are – I don’t know – a travel agent or in the travel industry. Posting pictures of incredible beach scenes and vacation scenes is an incredibly powerful way to use the photo tagging technique because it’s something that people, just everybody relates to and everybody gets excited about.

So, if there’s anybody in the audience like that, I really recommend finding some fantastic vacation photos and then encouraging your audience to tag themselves in the photo and pretend that they’re at the location.

Matt: Yeah. And for that matter, if there’s any way that you can tie sales, pictures of complete and utter failures to what your topic is, that’s also going to get really big interaction. You’ve got like a failed blog and things like that so sometimes Lou on the ultimate page will post people’s failing pretty hard which is actually what my picture is of. If you find that, you’ll find that pretty interesting as well

Lou: The fun way to do that often is to encourage your fans to tag their friends in their photos which can also happen. I’ve never really experimented with that too much out of fear that it might actually annoy some people, but it is a possible way to do some marketing that way.

Matt: All right. Andrew, unless you have any more super relevant questions you’d like to spit at us, we’re going to move on to this next step.

Andrew: Yeah. Let’s go to the next one. I do see that there a few people who can’t use these ideas right now because they’re managing client web pages and, of course, I understand that. Tomorrow, though let me know, let me know how it goes.

OK. So, they’re eager to see some more ideas, and a few of them are eager to try something new. So, what’s the next item?

Matt: You know what they say about working with clients: sell them what they want and give them what they need. Put these into use.

So, the next point is this or that. It’s just another kind of simple word play that Lou found a lot of success with. So let’s just talk about a little bit of this and I’ll go to some of the screen shots.

Lou: Yeah so, again, I found the best way to get interactions for a question that might be a little bit more seemingly open ended was to just post the options with the word “or” between them followed by a question mark. So you can see this example that Matt’s pulled up here that says “Desire or Talent” and I had been posting this question in a different way that said, “What’s more important, desire or talent?” and this way it’s funny because it’s so much easier to consume and read and it’s more scannable, people seem to react better to it and actually respond at a much, much higher rate. And also because I’m not putting any sort of context around, I let people put the context around it themselves.

So I didn’t put any sort of constraints around the question and because of that I let people kind of answer. And you’ll notice that a lot of these answers aren’t just the one word, they’re often the word and then some justification behind it or their response plus what they really think the question means. And this, I think, is maybe one of the most effective ways to kind of post some sort of question where you are trying to get some feedback from people.

Matt: Great. So, on top of that, Facebook recently launched the questions platform. Why don’t you talk just a little bit about the success you’ve seen at that while I show the examples.

Lou: Yeah, so Facebook questions has been around a long time in data but just about a week ago, week and a half ago, it got released to everybody. And I have noticed the interaction rates on these things are just absolutely gigantic. Matt was showing you the ultimate page here a second ago, but this is a situation where people are answering kind of polling type questions, the similar thing that we were just talking about, but now they can actually answer it with a lot less effort. All it takes is a mouse click to answer one response or the other if you give them the response. And in this case I’ve got “Do you believe in fairies?” and I think at the time of the post, which was only seven hours after it, I think it was in excess of 5,000 interactions. Can you hover over it right now?

Matt: Yeah, we’re at 5,400.

Lou: Just for yes and there’s another five for no, right? Yeah, those guys, 630 people killed a fairy. Thankfully, none of them was my girlfriend. So, I’ve noticed a ton of success just in the last week or so with Facebook Questions in terms of getting interactions. What’s really cool about this, is this stuff, again just like the pictures, last kind of forever. You know, normal news feed posts have a ephemeral, short-term life time to them that you often won’t see any more interactions beyond the first 24 hours or so. But with Facebook Questions, that question will just kind of live on for a long, long time, kind of continuing to promote the Twig the Fairy page.

Andrew: How are you adding the question, specifically, how do you get to the form where you create these poll questions?

Lou: Right. So, right when you’re making your status update, and I’ll have Matt go to it, so for instance, “What’s on your mind?”, right above it, it gives you that status option, “Question” option, “Photo”, “Link” or “Video” and if you hit “Question” there, you can type a question. We’re not going to post this, obviously. And then you can post, put some options in there. And then you give people the option to add additional option answers, or you could just fix the answers at the two or three or four or ten that you give them.

Andrew: Perfect. OK, great. Yeah, people are loving this. People are loving this. Great feedback. Hey, one question came in from Jason that I didn’t want to hold on to until later because it’s kind of important. He’s asking, “Once you ask these questions or put these polls up and people start interacting, how often do you go back in and respond?” It seems like if you’re getting thousands of people who are commenting, you have some obligation to go join but you can’t respond to all those people.

Lou: Yeah, I use it very, very sparingly, to be honest. And the reason for that is, and in all the pages that I run, unless it’s a customer service type oriented question or something that really warrants an answer, or we have a really, really funny or good response for it, we just kind of let it live in the Facebook ethos unanswered forever. With Twig, it’s interesting, because often the fans actually kind of groove up together and then answer the questions themselves, because it’s a community.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Lou: As well as the ultimate community like that, it is one of the beautiful pieces of Facebook right that you as the page owner don’t necessarily have to answer the question yourself. Sometimes your fans and your brand ambassadors are out there answering the questions for you. For the business owners out there, I would say that you do want to be as responsive as possible. And, for some of the brands like that, the advice that I tend to give them is, whatever you put on the page, you want to make sure that whoever ends up consuming it, that they’re left with a good taste in their mouth.

And an example of that is, what you’ll find is, particularly for local businesses and businesses that tend to get a lot of complaints. Like, I don’t know, mobile phone providers, they’ve got complaints all over their pages. I think it’s an opportunity that a lot of these brands really pass up. Because if you’re out there showing compassion and empathy for the people who are having problems with your product, and you can post a conversation on that wall, and in a post or two posts, get that person to turn around and say, “Thank you so much for reaching out to me and responding to this question. I now love your brand,” it’s maybe the most powerful piece of marketing that you can put out there. Showing that somebody hated you, and then, in a matter of one or two sentences, you completely changed them, changed their mind and get them to kind of believe in your product, is a really big opportunity.

Matt: Any other questions that you’d like to cover, Andrew, before we move on?

Andrew: I’ve got a few here that I’ve written down. We’ll come back to them later.

Matt: Sounds great. So, let’s move on to the next one, which is really kind of another example of crowd sourcing your content. But as the first point says here, you can really reuse content from number five and number six. So that’s what people are responding to. But let’s talk a little bit more about how you’ve used quoting your fans in the past.

Lou: Yeah. I think the big one is often I’ll use the fill in the blank type posts to get really funny or, really, the kind of content that’s going to be engaged. And then repost it, and then I put their name attached to it and share it with the people that that are connected with the page. So you can probably scroll up and take a look here.

So, this is one of the cases where I took, you know, one of the most popular responses in the film “The Blank Post,” and then I re-posted it. And, you know, it’s just one of these really powerful things that shows the people that there isn’t some sort of a robot behind this page, and that there is somebody kind of thinking behind it, and, you know, some intelligence behind it in the community.

Matt: You know, I think this is something important. I think Mike is the one that asked the question about local, right? So, a lot of people, when you’re working in with a local business, a lot of people like to hear their names said, and they like to get recognition or credit or whatever. And this is a great opportunity to focus on people that are in your local community and make them feel special on your page, specifically.

Andrew: So, how are you doing that? Oh, I see. Can you scroll up? I want to make sure that we see that on our screens. Where did you quote something from the audience?

Matt: It was right here, Jake.

Andrew: Oh, I see. OK. So that’s Jake’s response, “The best-looking players make the best ultimate players.” OK, all right. So you had, “The best blank,” and you had the blank there and he filled it in and you guys quoted him. And even the quote got 32 comments and 123 ‘likes.’

Matt: Yep. So, as you can see, chronologically they’re in the reverse order.

Andrew: Got you. OK, I see now how you would do that.

Matt: Yep. And then the picture here is also an example. Oreo taking a fan and putting their picture directly in the Oreo profile picture here.

Andrew: Oh, I see. So that’s a fan picture that they used in their profile picture. Got it, got it, OK.

Matt: Exactly. Yep.

Andrew: Oh, that’s cool. I could see really being excited if my picture was there, wanting to show it to my friends. All right, cool.

Matt: Yeah.

Andrew: Knowing how many people would see it. Clever. I like it.

Matt: Absolutely. So, I think that was pretty straightforward, just repurposing the content that you are getting from people through your other methods. So, let’s talk a little bit about monetization, which is obviously the concept of our world. And as people, it all boils down to dollars and cents at some point. So, let’s talk about some of the ways that you, Lou, have used Facebook to monetize.

Lou: I think there has been two primary methods that I’ve used. One of them is very simple and it goes against one of the things that we’ve already talked about here. But, I think there is a right way to do it and that’s basically to use this method very sparingly and make sure that it is very timely. And that’s just to share links, so if you’ve got a site where you’re selling something or maybe you are running some sort of affiliate program.

You know that what you can do is take a platform, and if you can get clicks, it then turns into money. Using all of the techniques leading up to number eight is going to work very well because you are going to have a free audience to communicate with. Because it does not cost anything to set up a Facebook post. This is truly owning an audience in this sense. It even costs money to run your own website, for the most part. It costs money to run an e-mail campaign, if it’s large enough.

But you can get to the point where, maybe having one million people on your email list is going to cost quite a bit of money to send out updates. Or send out that e-mail blast. But it’s not going to cost you anything on your Facebook page. And you can do it every single day and make sure people don’t get annoyed with it.

So you can use these first seven to do something in eight by posting some links where people might be interested in buying a product if it’s contextually relevant because of the date, because of the time of the year, because you are selling flowers before Mother’s Day, because you are selling calendars just before the new year, because you are selling an old weight loss product before the end of the year, because you are selling gift cards right before Christmas. Stuff like that.

Matt: And, everybody in the audience, you’re here at Mixergy, you’re at a Mixergy course, so I have feeling you listen to as many Mixergy recordings as I do. And, the way that I pitched Andrew this idea initially was, look all the entrepreneurs that come onto your show, the majority of them, or a lot of them that have seen success when Andrew asked them a question, where did you find your first customers. Because we know he nit-picks and finds exactly what their first step was. It always seems to be that they already have an audience.

They had somebody following their every move. They had somebody that is engaged with them and that has an affinity for what they are going to do next. And these are all ways that you can use to get people to be connected to you. And, when you launch a new product for your business or when a when you do something new for you business, the easiest way to get that out is to put that message into that immediate audience of people that love your brand. Your brand champion, so to speak.

Lou: One more thing on link sharing that I’ve done occasionally is use photos to bridge the gap between your ordinary link sharing and a link sharing that seems a little bit less intrusive to you. So, what I’ve often done is to post an album of three photos with some content that I think people would like to interact with. And then when people click and browse the photos through the Facebook photo browser in the photo description include some links with a call to action to click on those links. And that seems to be a little more effective way to make sure that you’re not alienating your audience and making them feel like they are being sold to. Because it is so easy to click the unlike button. But that’s a good way to invite the audience in a little bit more and get them to click on the links that can raise money for you.

Matt: Andrew, does the audience have any specific questions about the monetization section?

Andrew: Yeah, let me make sure I understand this. One of the things that we talked about before the sessions was how to make an offer that you’re linking out from Facebook to. How to make it relevant and timely. So, if I have a product I’d like to sell and I’d like to like to it from Facebook and make it timely and relevant, what are some of the ways I can do that?

Lou: I gave you some examples already, so if you have products that are relevant to Christmas time, obviously that’s a great time to share them. It seems like every single month, there’s definitely a relevant holiday.

Matt: I think the internet example is an example that you used before.

Andrew: Yes. Like Shawn what’s his name. Why am I not thinking of him? The winning guy.

Matt: Oh Charlie.

Lou: Charlie Sheen.

Andrew: Charlie Sheen. Let’s give the example of how you would react to Charlie Sheen getting so much attention online.

Matt: Exactly.

Lou: That’s definitely an opportunity to put one product that you might have in the context of this meme that’s happening, right? Maybe you’ve got a performance enhancing type of product, maybe you’re Tim Ferriss and you want to tell people, “Hey! If you want to be winning like Charlie Sheen, this is an opportunity”‘, and share the link with more information.

Matt: Use the promo code. Use the promo code to get the tiger’s blood.

Lou: Right.

Andrew: I love that idea. You can offer a product that has nothing to do with Charlie Sheen, or whatever happens to be the meme of the moment, but you can say, ‘If you go in the next half hour to this site and use the promo code (whatever the meme is. Maybe it’s ‘tiger’s blood’, or maybe it’s ‘winning’, then you’ll get a big discount’. That seems like an exciting reason for people to go over right away and follow that link. It makes it relevant and timely, as you say.

Matt: Join Lou Abramowski and Matt Ellsworth as they present an incredible course on Facebook! Promo code: Plant a Money Tree!

Andrew: [laughs] Winning! Mike in the audience is saying: can you show how you would make this relevant to a service-based business. So, if someone is running a service-based business, and now they’ve followed all of the ideas that you’ve given them up until now, and they’ve built up a following on Facebook, lots of fans, lots of engagement, and now they’re trying to get that person to come to their site. How would they do that? How would they use some of these modernization techniques that you’re talking about?

Lou: Can we get a little bit more detail on what the service-based business is? Maybe an industry, or what kind of service we’re providing? Is it consulting?

Andrew: Sure. Mike, if you pop in yours, I’ll be happy to use it, but since you didn’t yet, how about if we say it’s a dentist?

Lou: Dentistry is actually really, really cool because it’s so universal. I think that people could use a lot of these techniques every single day. I can imagine using a question like, “Floss or brush?”. You could share pictures of people’s really nice teeth. You could have people send in their smiles. You could post pictures of people smiling, and encourage people to tag themselves in the photo of the smile that they wish their smile looked like.

Matt: Celebrity smiles. Just show the mouth, and then later reveal which celebrity it is. Have people guess who the celebrity is.

Lou: Yes. I can think of a ton of opportunities like that. For services like that, there’s an opportunity where if you’re doing all of these other things, and you’re keeping your audience engaged, they will be forgiving when you do occasionally post something, if you are a dentist, that you’re offering up a new product, and you’re really excited to tell people that the brand new teeth whitening service is now available at your dentistry, and all they need to do is call this number or go this website to make an appointment.

Matt: Actually . . .

Andrew: OK. I see. Sorry. Go ahead. I’ll read Mike’s response in a moment.

Matt: I was just going to say that I chipped my tooth last year. I literally took a picture of myself when my dentist left the room, with gauze and all that stuff in my mouth, the clamps and everything. I posted it to my Facebook. She then told me that if people came to her from that post on Facebook that she would give me a referral fee, and it did work. I actually have a couple of friends that went to that dentist later. I don’t know how exactly you could work that in, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to work in referral fees into your business as well.

On that note, my girlfriend works at a hair salon. I’m constantly saying, “You need to take after pictures of a good haircut. Have them tag themselves in it so that they’re representing themselves. They look good. They’re getting a cameo on the page, and also their friends will see that.”

Andrew: Mike’s response is a really good one. He’s saying, “OK. If you have a service-based business, you want to show results, not the service.” I guess the reason he was asking the questions earlier about service businesses is that they don’t have any products to offer, take pictures of, or have people engage with on the fan page. So, show the results–that’s a great idea.

Let me ask you about one other service-based business that I know we have a lot of in the audience–developers. People who have development chops–how do they make their customers or potential customers “part of the party”–as you say in the modernization section there and monetize?

Lou: That’s a difficult one, because it tends to be a little bit less social, I think, but imagine if you’re in the industry. This goes a little bit out of our conversation, but I think you could put together some really fun, little apps. We didn’t really get into everything with Twig and Ultimate Page and some of the other things that I’ve done, but if you are a development shop or creative agency type shop, that’s a great opportunity to showcase your work on that Facebook page.

Like I was saying before, If you can share links without leaving Facebook and put a little piece of, maybe–we were just talking about results–or an example of your work on the Facebook page, it could be really, really interesting to get people engaged and see what you’re capable of doing right inside Facebook. I think it could be really powerful.

Andrew: OK.

Matt: I mean, there are all kinds of fun things you can do with humor in relation to developers and computer geeks, and that kind of stuff as well. I think it’s also possible for you to show us Internet “fails”, show pictures of where code has gone bad, or where things are not working as they should be, and why it looks really bad, and why it’s important to have a good, strong developer.

Andrew: OK, one more question on this section before we move on. Did you give an example of the beauty of what you call “micro-campaigning?” What’s a micro-campaign? What’s a good example of a micro-campaign?

Lou: That was the next thing I was going to get to. This is the other technique that I’ve used that’s worked well in an affiliate model, but imagine that if you’ve got multiple products–this is a really, really good, tried and true technique, actually, and I probably haven’t even used it as effectively as it could be done, and I’d really love to hear from some people in the audience if they’ve managed to find a way that really works, but, one of those things that I’ve done.

I’ll give an example from the Ultimate Page. I ran a themed week where every single day, I posted a picture of a particular type of cleat, or–I don’t know how many international people are out there, but a “boot”, I guess–footwear that Ultimate players wear, and every single day, I encouraged people to give their comments and reviews on a particular type of cleat. And then I watched as people “liked” the different comments, and agreed, and did those things.

At the end of the week, I summarized all of the user-generated content from the entire week in a single post, along with links to all of the different products where they could buy them. I just did that through Amazon, and it was incredibly successful, just in a single day–particularly for where I was at with the Ultimate page at the time and I’ve done some other examples, too, of that similar thing. It’s this really, really neat thing where you spend time getting people really engaged, seriously, inside the content, with kind of this promise of a sales pitch potentially coming, and at the end of it actually delivering.

Matt: For the affiliates out there, this Ultimate page that we run, it’s a great example of a somewhat vague concept. This isn’t a specific business. It’s a general concept or a general category. Don’t be afraid to start pages like that, where you’re dealing with a general subject. In fact, sometimes, those are the pages that are doing the best. Where somebody takes a concept like ultimate Frisbee that anybody who’s ever played can relate to, and are now connecting with Lou in one location about ultimate, and there he is, able to monetize with cleats or things that are relevant to the game.

Lou: I’d like to add one other kind of variance of this type of micro-campaign. You have this particular set of products that you yourself want to sell, you might want to solicit your audience for feedback for the type of promotion that they’d like to see on your page. Maybe, you know that you’re willing to give a big discount on one product for one single day. It’s really a three post cycle.

The first post is to say, “OK, I want to hear you guys out. If you could have any product for free shipping and 25% off for one day, which product would it be?” Then you get a bunch of comments. Again, you probably want to frame it, like fill in the blank, or use a Facebook question for it, something like that. Follow it up with a final vote, and pick three or four finalists for those products.

After you’ve now posted twice, figuring out what product they most want, on the third one, give it to them. Hammer it down, send them the product, give them the link. They know it’s coming. They actually have a true vested interest in it. You were able to give them two updates ahead of time of what’s going on. Now, you’re not doing just this generic campaign that came out of nowhere. It’s actually a fan-solicited campaign. I’ve actually read some reports on this. You can get up to a three 3x list in the participation, in that kind of a promotion, versus just posting them regularly.

Andrew: OK. I was actually going to ask that. You just took the question right out of my mouth. I was going to say, “What about the idea of just putting up a link straight up?”. You’ve done all of this work to build up the audience, is it OK to just post a link straight up? It sounds as though your answer is yes, it’ll work, do it sparingly, but this campaign, this mini campaign, is going to work tremendously.

Lou: Right.

Matt: Absolutely.

Andrew. All right. Fair enough. A lot of people have been asking about the app marketplace, as soon as they saw the fairy name app that you had on the Twig the Fairy page. I’m eager to get to that. Let’s start with that question that people keep asking. What is the app that you use for your Twig the Fairy’s ‘your fairy name’?

Lou: It’s actually a homegrown app. I actually wrote that app. In a general form, what it really is is a quiz app. People enter in their input, then at the other end, they get some sort of an output. I get to that in a little bit. That app is something that I actually wrote, so it’s not widely available [laughs]. But there are some…

Andrew: That’s what I’ve been telling people. Where do they get their own apps if they can’t write apps themselves? Where should they go? Obviously, Wildfire has something to do with this.

Lou: I think there are really two good locations. We’re not affiliated with these guys in any way, but I can tell you that these guys have been, in my opinion, the best in class of the self-service, cheap apps out there that can really grow your fan base. You can associate your Facebook page with some sort of an app to drive fan growth. Wildfire is obviously one of them. The other one is North Social.

I want to talk first about the products that Wildfire has. For the people that are out in the audience, I think that you really want to try to focus on the three top ones that I mention here. The group deals. If you’ve got a product and you want to do like a Groupon style type of sale, where if you cross the one hundred purchase threshold, then all of the people get a discount.

Coupons are also a very good one. The people that are interested in your product, you can offer them coupons if they like your page.

Similar to the fairy name app, there are quiz apps available from Wildfire, that you can kind of customize them so that they are more brand promotional for your own brand. You can see the pricing here, there are affordable options for just about anybody.
The most important thing that I wanted to mention here is that, I’m not sure if everybody in the industry would agree with me here, but I really think contests and sweepstakes devalue your brand, and devalue your audience quite a bit. Just to speak frankly, I think a lot of people just want free shit. I think that by running some sort of a contest and sweepstakes on your page, the fans that you actually get out of that promotion, aren’t necessarily the fans that you want connecting with your page, if it’s going to cost you money.

It’s like I talked about before, all of the people that are not in your monthly active users list, there’s virtually no way to communicate with those people. And, I think the people that run contests and sweepstakes, and I’ve seen this over and over, have some of the lowest participating fans on their pages. And I think it’s just because people tend to want to get free shit, so they tend to sign up for the sweepstakes, like the page, and then go ahead and unlike it after they’ve done it, or never interact with the page ever again.

So, I just wanted to share my two cents on that, and it would be my recommendation to stay away of contests and sweepstakes, if what you you’re really trying to do is build an active audience.

Andrew: OK.

Lou: Then I guess, on the North Social, and the two apps that North Social brings to the table that I think are pretty interesting are their first impression apps, and then I guess in regard with what Matt just had to say about creating kind of community pages, as kind of this side campaign opportunity to promote your business. They’ve got a partner pages product that’s pretty cool, too.

Andrew: How were you guys able, earlier, to limit access to Twig the Fairy’s fan page, to limit access to it, to people who actually liked her? Is that part of Facebook’s fan page structure?

Lou: No, we actually have to write the code for that, it’s fairly a simple code and for anybody that’s out there that’s familiar with Elance, or any place where you can get some free lance work, or anybody who has done even the smallest bit of Facebook programming will know how to do that, fairly inexpensive. And a lot of the apps I just mentioned, with Wildfire and North Social, will have that incorporated in, it’s called like gating, it used to be called fan gating when fans were still fans.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Lou: But it just means that content gets revealed after the person is willing to like your page.

Andrew: I see.

Lou: At the bottom we’ve got Facebookswagger.com, it’s something that I just got up this weekend, or I guess just today, really. But, what I’m going to start doing is sharing a lot more of these tips in a ton more detail, kind of on a regular basis. Because I realize we’re already forwarding this over here, and we barely like scratched the surface on this topic. And, Andrew, if you gave me the time I would probably talk for ten more hours.

Andrew: And I know the people would want ten more hours of information from you. So you’re saying that if they go to Facebookswagger.com, they’re going to see your blog, where you share more tips and you try to go into even more depth then you did right here?

Lou: Yeah, absolutely, right. To answer the most recent question that was just asked, about how do we keep this kind of like gating stuff. I’m definitely going to start sharing this kind of stuff in high level detail for people. So that they can get a lot more information and we’ll go beyond all these tips in more detail, and even a lot more cooler stuff, than the stuff that I discover when I discover it, too.

Andrew: OK. So if they want to like gate, which means rewarding people for hitting the like button, by giving them special access, then for now they use an app from a company like Wildfire, they’re have access to that feature, or if they go to Elance, they can hire somebody to can create that like gate. So I hope that’s useful for you guys who have been asking that question.

Let me go through some of the questions that people have been asking throughout, and then of course if you have other questions, I’ll take them in a minute in the chat room. So, let’s see, a lot of them we actually asked as we continued. Oh, what happens when other people post on your Facebook page? You know they see that you have some traffic, and they decide that they’re going to kind of compliment you as a way of getting attention for themselves or links to their fan page or their personal page, or their personal campaign?

Matt: So is this more towards somebody who comments on your blog, and then leave their link very plain and clear for people to see a thing they wrote, something similar on the subject?

Andrew: Kind of like that. It’s less spammy, but on a blog it’s the comments and it’s out of the way. On your Facebook fan page, if they write something on your wall everyone gets to see it, and as you were showing the Twig the Fairy fan page, I didn’t see a single comment that wasn’t written by Twig, or a wall post that wasn’t written by Twig.

Lou: Yeah, I’m so glad somebody asked this question. Because it just didn’t make the cut in our agenda here. The very first thing that I would tell people is to change your settings for your wall to be your posts only. I think I can go in here and do this by going into edit. Let me see if I remember here. I don’t know why it’s showing the wrong thing here, but you can see the options, right? For everybody in the audience, I would strongly recommend that you put only posts by page as your wall option. The reason for that is because people accidentally hand over their account to some malicious app that starts posting links all over the place.

Andrew: Right.

Lou: The last thing that you want for the first impression for somebody visiting your wall is 24 spam links, not driven by you. By resetting this setting right here to be only the posts by your page, you really get to control the view that people have of your page.

People still have the opportunity to post on Twig’s page. You’ll see it here. If we go to the most recent, you’ll notice that lots of people have posted. Tons of people, over and over. Pictures and comments, all over the place.

Like you said, Andrew, you didn’t see that because our setting is set that this is the default view, and this is the way that we want it. It doesn’t necessarily encourage a ton of interaction as a community, but I don’t think there’s a really solid way to do that anyway. Not one that works very, very well. This is a good way, for the times that we don’t get to look at the fan page for sixteen consecutive hours, that it doesn’t get taken over by some spam link.

I’d say, just as a policy for myself, any time that I see people posting links that just aren’t relevant at all, and they’ve made no effort to be relevant, I just delete the post. That’s just my personal preference. I’ll get a message every once in a while, people asking why we deleted it, and I’ll tell them, frankly, if you’re not joining the conversation, then your posts just get deleted. That’s just how it is.

Matt: One more thing to add to that is you can go back up to repurposing your fans or posting your fans’ content. If somebody posts something meaningful, and you have this filter set, and you know that not many people saw it, you can always bring it up by saying, ‘Laura posted this great picture.’, and reshare that.

Andrew: Got it. OK. Quite a few people early on were asking: what about the first thousand fans? We can see how once there is an active community that’s liking and answering questions, that they bring in more people. How do you get those first thousand fans that will then help spread the word beyond?

Lou: I’d start with seed the community with the contacts that you already have. That’s the way that I started the ultimate page, which is in excess of 80,000 people and accelerating. I play ultimate. I started by inviting one hundred of my ultimate playing friends, and I asked them if they’d like the page. Then I started putting out good content, and they started recommending the page to their friends, or just interacting with the page. Because of the viral nature of Facebook, it would just spread virally.

Everybody has their own network, whether it’s just small, or maybe you’ve already got a big platform with an e-mail list, or you’ve got your website. If you’ve got a brick and mortar store, you can print off business cards, and then hand them out as people walk through the door.

Matt: How do you feel about asking people to invite their friends to like the page, specifically if I just posted, ‘Hey guys, I’m trying to get this page going. Invite all of your friends.’.

Lou: I think it could be done if its done in a fun way. In fact, back when Twig’s page started, there was no such thing as a vanity URL for her page. The vanity URL didn’t come out until much later. Twig was sitting at about nine hundred and fifty fans or so, at the time the vanity URLs came out. It was required that you have at least one thousand fans to get it. We posted on the page, “I need one thousand fans to get my own Facebook URL”, followed by a frowny face. That’s all it said.

We hit a thousand in the next like two minutes. So, you know I think if you want to be, if you want to do something like that you just need to be a little clever about how you post it rather than posting something just soliciting people and asking them to recommend the page.

Andrew: All right. That’s really helpful. What I’m seeing over and over in this session is ask for it. Ask for participation, just keep asking and ask for it explicitly. It’s not enough to ask a question. It’s more powerful to ask a question with a blank line and let people understand that they can fill it in and then make it easy for them to fill it in.

Lou: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: So I see that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for all this. I actually see here, Seth in the audience is saying, “Maybe they can do a Beyond Facebook 101 version. Can they do another session?”

Lou: [laughs]

Andrew: I think the other session’s going to have to be Facebook swagger for now. But I like the direction you’re going in, Seth. Let me ask you guys this, if there are questions afterwards, can I take them from people who may be listening to the recorded version of this and pass some them over to you or create a place for them to ask their questions so that you can see them?

Lou: I think we’ll Facebookswagger.com will be launched very soon and I think they’ll be an open channel for people to ask questions there. So I think in a couple days here you can ask questions that way, and you can sign up on Facebookswagger.com for the actual launch date.

Andrew: Perfect. And is that what that bar was at the top, telling us how much time before we officially launch?

Lou: Yep, (?) day.

Andrew: Yeah. All right. Well guys, thank you so much for putting on this session. It was really helpful. And thank you everyone in the audience who actually tried these ideas out as Lou and Matt were teaching them. If you’re listening to the recorded version of this, come back and let me know how you’re using these ideas. I hope you’re using these ideas as you are listening to the recorded version. Come back, give me feedback and of course, check out Facebookswagger.com where you can get even more information we talked about here today. It’s just Facebookswagger.com