DotCom Secrets
Page 9
Do You See How Seinfeld Emails Work? Do you see how the story eventually ties into a product?
That’s how your Attractive Character is going to communicate with your list in every email you send after your Soap Opera Sequence. It’s fun. And once you get the hang of it, the writing goes pretty fast. You can even dictate the email, record it on your phone, and then send it to your assistant to be transcribed.
One thing I should note here. These are broadcast emails, not auto-responders.
Soap Opera Sequence emails are set up to be an auto-responder sequence. That means after someone signs up, they get email one on the first day, then email two on the next, etc.
Seinfeld emails are different. After someone has completed your SOAP series, they should be moved to a broadcast list where they will only get the Seinfeld email that you send out that day. Seinfeld emails are typically not lined up in a sequence that everyone has to go through. That doesn’t mean you can’t write them ahead of time and schedule the broadcasts in your email provider, but typically they are tied to relevant things happening in the life of the Attractive Character as they are happening.
Lastly, these emails do double duty when you put them on your blog. People often ask me what they should write about on their blogs, and I always tell them simply to copy and paste their daily Seinfeld email. It’s quick, easy, and consistent blog content that leads people to a sale.
Let’s Review: Your Soap Opera (auto-responder) Sequence is your Attractive Character’s introduction to your new subscriber. If you follow the outline I provided, you’ll notice an increase in your sales simply because people can relate to your backstory and epiphany after they read about it.
Seinfeld emails continue the conversation on a daily basis. The goal is to be fun and entertaining while you sell stuff.
You can get started with this right now. Go download your Soap Opera Sequence template, and write your first five emails.
Then start writing your Seinfeld emails and loading them into your email provider. If you get stuck for ideas, my team has compiled a list of writing prompts for you. Download them at www.DotComSecretsBook.com/resources/seinfeld.
Up Next: Now that you have seen how we communicate with the traffic that we are bringing into our funnels, it’s time to shift focus back to building your sales funnel. Section 3 is called Funnelology and will discuss the strategies behind building your successful sales funnels.
SECTION THREE:
FUNNELOLOGY LEADING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO THE SALE (OVER AND OVER AGAIN)
SECRET #9:
REVERSE ENGINEERING A SUCCESSFUL FUNNEL
Before I start to build out any new sales funnel, the first thing I want to do is find other people who already have a successful funnel and are selling to my target market. If I can’t find other businesses, then I won’t continue to move forward. But if I can find others who are already successfully selling to the chosen market, then I can reverse engineer what they’re doing and figure out where they are getting their traffic.
The Internet is full of gurus teaching hundreds of different ways to generate traffic, and it seems like a new tactic or trick pops up every day. For me, I focus on one real strategy. I prefer to find out where the traffic already exists and then just plunk myself down in front of it and send it on a little detour to my site. Why work hard to generate traffic when it’s already out there waiting for you? This chapter is going to show you how to reverse engineer your competitors’ sales funnels. You will learn how to understand what they are doing, where their traffic is coming from, and how to transform their traffic into your traffic.
FIVE VARIABLES OF SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGNS
The first step to reverse engineering existing traffic streams is understanding the five elements that go into any successful online ad campaign. I never start creating a funnel unless I know at least four of these five things. I never want two unknowns. Also, as I’m analyzing my own funnels—if something isn’t working—it usually comes down to one of these five things:
1 Demographics
2 Offer
3 Landing page
4 Traffic source
5 Ad copy
Let’s look at each variable individually so you can get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.
1. Demographics. The demographics are all the characteristics of the people you’re targeting. The demographics define who belongs in the target group and who doesn’t. We’re talking about distinguishing factors, like age, sex, education, geographical location, income level, race, language, and political affiliations—any and all characteristics you can think of that define those people you want to reach with your message. For example, our supplement company has an older demographic of men and women. Our coaching company’s main demographic is entrepreneurs making between one and three million dollars a year.
If I put the right offer in front of the wrong demographic, it’s going to bomb. If I put a wrestling supplement offer in front of older people with diabetes, they’re not going to buy. So, we need to make sure we get our demographics right. Once you know the demographics of the people your competitors are going after, it’s very simple to know what yours should be.
When I first started working with our pain supplement, I had no idea who to target or where to find the traffic. So my team and I went through this process of reverse engineering some supplements similar to ours, and we found out very quickly where our competitors were placing their ads. We found that some of their ads were on diabetic websites (a segment we didn’t know would benefit from our supplement). We found ads running successfully on survival websites, natural health websites, and more. By digging deeper and researching our competitors, a whole new world of opportunity opened for us. After we found some of these new demographics, over the course of two months, we were easily able to scale a product that was making twenty thousand dollars a month to making over five hundred thousand a month now. Pretty cool, huh?
When you know your demographics, you know who your target market is and where they are likely to be hanging out online. You know what sites they’re on and where they get together to talk to each other. Once you have that information, it becomes very easy to scale your offer and build your business quickly.
2. Offer. The offer comes down to what you are selling and at what price point you are selling it, including your upsells and downsells. When I want to find out what my successful competitors are offering, I buy their products. Remember, the first offer you see probably isn’t the primary offer. It’s more likely to be what gets people in the door, while the real moneymakers are down the line somewhere. The first offer is just the tip of the iceberg, and I need to see their ENTIRE iceberg during this research phase.
When I’m researching competitors, I go in and purchase everything they offer me. I will easily spend hundreds of dollars to study their offers and their funnels. And I keep careful notes. This is critical competitive research. I want to know exactly what they’re selling, how they’re selling it, and at what point they’re offering each product in their funnel. What’s the copy on the sales videos? What emails am I getting? How many? Are they selling in every email or offering content in some? The more I know, the better chance of success I will have.
3. Landing Page. This is the page a person lands on right after they click on an ad, and I believe it’s the most important page in your entire sales funnel. What does that page look like for your successful competitors? Is it an opt-in page? Is it a sales page? What’s working for people right now? I’m not going to make up my own landing page and hope it works. I’m going to reverse engineer what’s already working and model that for my own page. I’m going to make something very similar to what’s already successful.
It always comes back to modeling what’s already working. It amazes me how so many people put up random sites they think look good, without first investigating successful sites in their niche. Then they wonder why they’re not making any money. It’s because they’re not following a p
roven model.
I remember when I first heard Tony Robbins speak, and he emphasized that if you want to be successful in any part of your life, you needed to find someone else who is already doing what you want to do and model your efforts after theirs. Nowhere is that idea truer than when you’re building a new sales funnel. You need to model what is working. Do NOT try to re-invent the wheel. That’s the secret. That’s how you take a decade of hard work and compress it down into a day’s worth of time and effort. Find what someone else has already done and model it. Start there, and then you can tweak your funnel, test it, and try to improve on that model after you’re already making money.
4. Traffic Source. Where is your competitor’s traffic coming from? What are the specific websites that competitor buys ads on? Is the traffic coming from banner ads or social media or email? Does he use mainly video or text?
Do not think that you need to “create” traffic. The traffic is already out there. All you have to do is find it, tap into it, and redirect it back to your offer. In just a minute, I’m going to show you some cool tools and techniques you can use to find out exactly where a competitor’s traffic is coming from so it’s easy to funnel those people to your offers.
5. Ad Copy. This is the last element of a successful campaign. What do successful ads look like? What makes people click on the ad? What’s enticing them to even look at the competitor’s ad in the first place? What pictures are competitors using? What does the headline say? What does the body copy look like? Are the competitors using video? All these things influence whether a person clicks on an ad or not. Remember, traffic is made up of real people. People can be persuaded to click, but it can take months or years of trial and error to discover how to make that happen. Don’t waste time trying to figure it out by blindly tweaking and adjusting your own advertising methods. Find what’s already working, and model it. Then once you’ve got a predictable, steady income, you can run split tests and try to improve on the ad yourself.
The whole reverse engineering process depends upon finding out about all five of these elements in regards to your competitors. Unfortunately, you’re not always going to be able to do that. I’ve gotten really good at the reverse engineering process, but there are still times when I can’t find all the banner ads, or I’m not sure about all the demographics. One unknown is not good, but you can usually try to guess and get close enough. If there are two unknowns, I’m probably not going into that market. I want as much data as possible before I start building out my offers, landing pages, and ads. Never move forward with two unknowns. Keep digging, keep researching until you find a niche where you can find all the data you need to move ahead and be profitable.
HOW TO REVERSE ENGINEER A SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN
Now that you know what to look for in your competitors’ campaigns, I’m going to show you how to dig up all this awesome information.
Step #1: Where Are Your Competitors (Both Direct AND Indirect)? Right now, your customers are where your competitors’ customers are. So, that’s where you need to start looking. You have two types of competitors: direct and indirect. A direct competitor is a person or company selling something very similar to yours. In the supplement business, anyone else selling the same type of supplements is my direct competitor. We are trying to sell basically the same thing to the same people. We’re going to do a direct competitor analysis in a moment.
There are also indirect competitors. These are people or companies selling something different than you, but to the same demographic. When I started studying indirect competitors, it was a huge eye-opener for me. I remember one day I found this cool supplement company selling weight-loss products to an older demographic. They were an indirect competitor because we were selling different products (weight-loss supplements for them and nerve pain supplements for me), but we were both going after the same demographic. I put their website into the tool I’m about to show you, and it opened up a whole new world of places to advertise and types of ads to try. Competitive research is awesome because it can open up new opportunities you never knew about before. For me, each new profitable website I find can be worth tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars a month! So you can see why I spend so much time searching for this buried gold.
The first step is to make a list of your direct and indirect competitors and their landing page URLs. If you don’t know who your competitors are, then just go to Google and start typing in search phrases you would want people to type in if they were searching for you. If you’re in the weight-loss niche, for example, you’d just type in phrases like “how to lose weight” or “losing weight quickly.” Look for the paid ads (usually on the right hand side) and start clicking on those ads. This will give you a good idea of who your successful competitors are. Now that you have your competitors’ website URLs, let me show you how simple it is to find out exactly WHERE they are already advertising, WHAT ads they’re running, and WHERE they are sending their traffic. Using this simple strategy, you’ll quickly be able to figure out all five of the variables in each of the competitors’ campaigns.
Step #2: What Are They Doing? There are a few products on the market that will do what I’m about to show you. At the time of my writing this book, my favorite is called SimilarWeb.com (SW). Because I want this book to stay evergreen, I will post a video showing you how to use SW here: www.DotComSecretsBook.com/resources/similarweb, and if my team ever finds software we like better, or if SW stops working, we’ll give you the most up-to-date information on that page.
So, the first step is to put in your competitor’s website URL. For this example, I will enter one of my own websites for you to see.
Fig 9.2: It’s easy to find your competitors’ traffic sources with online tools like Similar Web.
From here, I can quickly see each of the paid traffic sources that the competitor is using.
As I start clicking on some of the other options on the side of the page, I can see the demographics of the traffic that is coming to that website. I can dig deeper into the traffic sources and actually see what sites my ads are running on, when they were first seen, and the duration each ad has been running. (Hint: longer duration=ad that is working.)
Fig 9.3: Long running ads are usually high-converting and big money makers.
As I dig deeper, I can start to see the exact banner ads that are working, including the ad copy that is converting.
Fig 9.4: Collect the actual ads your competitors are running and model them for your own ads.
I can also see the landing pages the competitor is pushing the majority of traffic to and a whole bunch more. Do you see how in less than five minutes I can learn EVERYTHING I need to know about a competitor’s campaign? I’ve just shown you how quickly you can grab the five variables we need to be successful:
1 Demographics
2 Offer
3 Landing page
4 Traffic source
5 Ad copy
The last step is actually to purchase my competitor’s product so that I can see the upsells and downsells. What email does this company send to customers? What else happens after the initial purchase? Armed with this information, you now have everything you need to start building out your own successful sales funnels in that niche.
Isn’t it amazing? You can literally reverse engineer everything your competitor is doing in less than ten minutes. Just plug in the website and go where they have already gone. Sell to the customers who have already shown interest in this type of product or service. Redirect them to buy your products!
LET’SREVIEW:
1 Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors.
2 Find each landing page URL.
3 Enter a URL into the online research tools.
4 Collect data, dig deep, click on links, buy products, and see what the competitor is doing.
5 Create a swipe file of ideas to model.
To help you out, I’ve created a checklist you can download and keep handy while you’re research
ing. With this checklist, you’ll be sure not to miss any critical components of your research. To download the checklist, go to www.DotComSecretsBook.com/resources/reverse.
Up Next: Now that you’ve had a chance to look at what your competitors’ sales funnels look like, I want to walk you through the seven phases of all successful sales funnels. This will give you a very clear example of each of the phases that your customers should go through as they ascend your Value Ladder.
SECRET #10:
SEVEN PHASES OF A FUNNEL
What’s the difference between a six-figure, seven-figure, and eight-figure business? When I first started to scale my companies, I thought there must be huge differences between each of these levels, but that’s not the case. After going through these levels over the past decade or so, I can tell you the main difference is not what you might think.
• It’s not the products you sell.
• It’s not the type of business you run—online or local brick and mortar.
• It’s not the traffic.
• It’s not the sales copy.
• It’s not a high-converting website.
• It’s not a product-launch method.
These things are all important. They’re all elements of a successful business. But they are not the core difference that sets the levels apart.
The real difference between having a six-, seven-, or even eight-figure business is whether you understand the phases of a funnel and can successfully monetize the different points along the line.