Bacon Wrapped Hustle: A Cross Over with Matt Wolfe And Joe Fier

Want to have some fun? In this special crossover edition, I joined up with two of my business partners, Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier from Evergreen Profits and the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, to get into a “flow” and talk about some of the best business advice we know, share the challenges and goals we have, and basically just riff off each other the way we normally do in our meetings… and then always wish we would have recorded them.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• Why podcasting shouldn’t be your business model, but how it also can help you build a fantastic business
• Access versus influence, and why having both in your entrepreneurial toolbelt is required
• Using a content framework to clarify your message and build your know, like and trust factor
• Joe’s quick way to personalize the sales experience for your customer that converts like crazy
• How using Curt Maly’s Hot 7 technique has gotten Matt over 150,000 reach in 30 days on a $1/day Facebook ad budget
• This is the next best thing to invest your focus in if you ask Joe
• Proof that brand ads beat the crap out of direct response ads while you’re building a business
• Cool tools and gadgets we use check-in

About The Guest: Matt Wolfe

Moxie, that’s the first glimpse Matt Wolfe got of what it took to be an entrepreneur. He learned it from his father, the man who started his own company with a wife, three kids and no back-up plan. Naturally, with a guy like that in charge, Matt couldn’t really fall too far from that tree.

Pair Matt’s role model up with the two guys he calls his favorite authors, Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins, and it’s natural to see why he was always destined to be his own boss. Some of the biggest lessons Matt learned from his role models and favorite thought provokers included how to manage people effectively, delegate with confidence and create efficient systems.

Of course, those lessons aren’t the easiest to internalize. Matt admits his biggest weakness is not letting stuff go because he knows he’s pretty damn efficient at getting things done. He feels if he could just delegate more in the business and be comfortable letting go of clutter in his life, he could reach his goals at a much quicker pace. Guess it makes it easy to understand why his primary focus right now is to let stuff go, doesn’t it?

About The Guest: Joe Fier

Joe Fier always knew he was meant to live “big,” something he shared with his mom when he was a young grasshopper. He looked up to her as the most successful person he knew, who always had her shit together and got paid very well to do the work she did. He promised her one day he would make her proud and make more money than she did. Let’s just say Joe has one proud momma who’s thrilled for his success these days.

So, how did Joe Fier become the son of a beaming mother? What’s his secret sauce for success? I’m guessing it would be his superpower, the ability to befriend just about anyone. Taking that one step further, Joe’s goal of wanting to be remembered as a friend, as the guy who made people’s days a little better, more fun or interesting is definitely a major contributing factor also.

Even from his first steps into the working world, Joe took a great approach to make the best of it. When he took those first jobs at Burger King, then Famous Footwear, he made sure to recruit his friends to come work at the same place. He figured if he had to get paid he might as well have fun doing it, and that’s exactly the type of environment he created as a young employee turned “recruiter.”

Bacon Wrapped Hustle: A Cross Over with Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier

This is a special episode. I'm Brad Costanzo. My show is Bacon Wrapped Business, sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. I’m a consultant. I'm an entrepreneur. I buy businesses.

I work with a variety of types of businesses and helping them to grow, get unstuck, find clarity and using multiple traffic conversion strategies and whatnot. You guys introduce yourself to my audience.

I'm Joe Fier and we have Matt Wolfe. We are cohosts of Evergreen Profits and we also have a podcast called Hustle and Flowchart. We talked to a whole bunch of business owners, authors, investors, traffic ninjas to help you work less and make more, but think a little differently in the process.

What a lot of people don't know is that we all went into business together on an acquisition. We acquired a business that we’re rehabbing. It’s a great business. There are tons of opportunity. We started off as friends and we became business partners.

When we did our last couple of episodes we were on your show and you were on ours, we weren’t in business together yet, were we?

No, I don't think so. You guys were on my show and it probably took six months to come out.

We talked about owning businesses, being advisors, taking equity or rev share part of a company and we made it happen. It's us still running the company, but we're learning and it's probably been one of the best learning experiences we've had all three of us in different ways.

It's a great training reels opportunity for us because we've all got our own businesses. We all have run those and we've done more startups from the ground floor, but this is the first time we've taken over an existing business and I enjoy it.

My audience knows I’ve done a lot of episodes of people who've bought businesses and sold businesses, especially buying ones because I'm a big believer that it's a lot easier to buy one than it is to build one. I've got to admit there's a big learning curve.

You get in and it's almost like, “Here you go.” Now what are you going to do with it? It's like, “I actually have to figure out where all the bodies are buried and all the little moving parts to keep it going.” All of us are very busy and we don't have time to devote like, “Let's just work on this.” It's not a big enough business to get all of our attention.

It's been a good exercise. We've each got businesses. There's this other piece in here. How do we scale a business without us being involved on a day-to-day basis? We have to figure that out as we go because we don't have time to be involved, all of us on a day-to-day basis because we've got other things to run.

I feel like we've all bought things at a smaller level. We bought some courses on Udemy from product owners out there rebranded it and then launched it. It was $500 but it's a creative way to get a head start in something. That's a great way. You’ve got to vet the product as you would with any business you buy.

The point of if you think of acquiring a business as some insane monumental thing, it can be. One of the quickest ways to get your feet wet is do what we did. Go and find somebody who is selling a course on Udemy.

They're probably not that invested into it. They're probably got another day job.

They've got other stuff going on this side. They set up a Udemy course as a side hustle. If somebody comes along and says, “I'm going to give you $1,000 for your course,” they've probably made $1,000 total on the entire time they've been on Udemy.

Udemy is screwing them. They're desperate for some cash.

We actually have courses on Udemy ourselves and we get $3 PayPal commissions once a month.

There are a lot of reasons why Udemy is screwing their product owners, but there's a lot of good talent on there.

One of the things you bring up as a big believer, people don't have to buy a business. You can buy assets. Can you borrow it? Can you buy it as opposed to building it?

My audience knows that I talk about these two words quite a bit and I try to put a lot of these under this umbrella of access and influence. Access being, what do you have access to?

Do you have access to customers? Do you have access to product, content, distribution channels or capital? There's a big difference between access and ownership. You don't have to own it if you can access it.

Therefore, a lot of people are familiar with doing joint ventures and affiliate partnerships. That's me accessing your audience without having to own it, but at the same time, access can mean can I buy it?

If you’re a Udemy author, you've got a great piece of content and you're not doing a great job, how can I access that? There are a couple of ways. I can go out and give you money for it. Buy it.

You go away and it's mine or I can license it. I can pay you a fee to just utilize it in a totally different way. You can keep selling it on your own, but I want to sell it over here in a different way. There are probably a number of other ways to access that as opposed to building it from scratch.

I wish I would have known a lot of these strategies when I was first starting off because I think it would have shortened the learning curve and the implementation curve going, “I’ve got to build this thing.”

You're approaching it with your own skill sets that you have, marketing for instance. A lot of people reading are marketers where they know to drive traffic, conversion or email. These people are usually knowledge folks.

They are creating something on sleep on how to code some topics so they might want to partner. We've done that before too, where we are the marketing arm or advisors and they're just supplying all the knowledge or the content. That's one last thing you have to worry about. You’re like, “I'm going to be good at what I do.”

To be honest, we've built a business around not even having our own product for the longest time. We’ve been affiliates because what our access or influence, I don’t know which one it would fall under. We've got some stuff down where we know what we're doing when it comes to media buying and paid traffic.

That was our leverage point. We can go find other products where we're like, “This is a good product. We like this. We think we can sell this,” and then use our existing knowledge of media buying to ramp up those products for people.

Access and influence in a lot of ways, we're big fans of the whole Perry Marshall 80/20 Tactical Triangle. Some people have seen that. There are three components to any of these businesses, especially from a marketing angle, which is the traffic, the conversion and the economics of it.

Access to me is almost the traffic. I wouldn't say that this is a perfect metaphor, but the influence is the conversion. Can I influence you to purchase it? How can I access the people who need what I've got and then can I influence them to make the purchase? The economics in there is one of the pieces that hold it all together.

Can I do it cost-effective so that I don’t go broke?

Can I make money? Can I reinvest it? Can I scale?

That's one of the areas where I screwed up a couple of years ago when I started a private label coffee brand. I was excited about the brand, the messaging and everything that we could do.

I knew I could get in front of people who liked to drink coffee, especially women who like to drink coffee, but I completely neglected and violated my own rules. The economics of the thing. I couldn't get access to those people and influence them to buy at a rate, cost per acquisition that allows me to survive.

It either has to be an expensive coffee or you have to do a lot of volumes.

The big thing is the profit margin.

Profit margins were just way too low and I went in and neglected it. I had blinders on.

I knew that I was violating a lot of the rules that I should set forth, but I got swept up in the passion of it all and the excitement. I was delusionally optimistic, which I think is important as an entrepreneur.

You’ve got to think, “I'm going to make this work. I’m going to figure it out even though I don't know how.”

That's a common question we receive all the time like, “I have this opportunity or I can do affiliate marketing, or I can make my own products. What do I do first?” I answered this question in every one of our groups, I'm like, “There's no perfect answer.

We can't see into the future. We don't have a crystal ball. We can try to lie to you, but we're not.”

At least everything that we've done is there's a now either business or thing of focus that can bring in the revenue now to pay the bills, to gain experience, made the connection, the access.

Maybe there's something you have access to now that you can do, but then there's a future business. Maybe it’s six months off or a year off, they can slowly start to build in the background or a few hours a week, not a full-time focus. It helps and that's more or less what we're doing with our Home Brew site.

You have to explore and check out new opportunities. On this show, I've been doing this thing called Wednesday WisDumb, where it's half wise, it's half dumb but it's these success platitudes.

It made me think of one which is picking one thing and focus. That to a degree, yes. If you've got that one thing where you feel extremely focused about, that's fine.

A lot more people I've found don't have that one thing where they've got extreme confidence and passion like, “This is the horse I'm going to ride all the way into the finish line.”

Those who don't actually dabble a little bit, play and experiment I think are leaving a lot of potential opportunities unexplored, potentially big ones.

Granted, I know I've been guilty of going the other extreme, going shallow and dabbling as opposed to going deep on one thing. I also think it's necessary because that's where the breakthroughs come.

You've got the main thing you're doing, experimenting, guessing, testing and you're exploring different things such as the business that we bought. It wasn't a business that I needed or I went into it wanting it, but I saw a potential opportunity here.

I was like, “Let's try this out.” I did become very cognizant of the mental bandwidth.

That's probably the majority of it for all of us honestly.

That's probably been the roughest part for all of us in that business is just balancing the businesses that we're running already and that mentally and the doing of it.

The challenge as you said is people dabbling. Couldn't you do that if you had let's just imagine you're a consultant. It’s the most basic thing. It's very simple to get started to get clients.

You can start dabbling as you said, Brad, “I'm going to try speaking. I'm going to try YouTube ads. I'm going to do retargeting on Facebook or all these other things.”

You can almost dabble within an offer that you know is making money and then experiment, but then parlay what you're learning there into maybe an affiliate offer or some other thing or info product.

The more you can keep your experimentation and dabbling focused. It’s focused dabbling.

Build a motor around yourself and you'll learn to make money in the process. That was a good little tangent. I think that's our biggest struggle but also growth.

For me, because of my aspirations and I almost purchased a much bigger business for seven figures. We went into due diligence and this is a multi-month process and I decided to walk away at the last minute because of a handful of red flags that I saw. I was like, “I'm going to instead help them make money but I'm going to create a profit center and act more as a consultant on this.”

I went in deep. A seven-figure transaction required me to learn a whole lot about a whole lot, but at the same time, I was honestly scared to death about what if this thing closes and now I have full operational control of this. I have to admit and this is one of those things, you get out of your comfort zone. This is where I'm out of my comfort zone.

If and when I acquire my next company because I know I will. I am actively looking for this as we all are. Will I have what it takes to step in and step up and run that and do it in a way that it's game on and not floundering?

With the business that we bought, it’s too small to get a lot of our time. At the same time, it's so perfect for all of the things that we know how to do that if we can't make this work the way we want it to and 10x or 20x this, we're retiring and it makes me feel bad.

We're in that weird predicament. It's like too small to get a whole lot of time, but it's too much opportunity to neglect. I've got to admit for anybody out there reading thinking that, “These guys look like they've got it all together and all figured out.” We do but we're figuring out as we go. Sometimes you just got to jump in and hope the net appears.

When it comes to the whole acquisition thing, this is something I've been thinking about. I'm actually curious to know your opinion because I don't think we've talked about this.

I've taken the approach that if you figure out one thing that you could specialize in, you can become the expert at this thing. For me, it's media buying. I love paid traffic. I love experimenting with paid traffic.

If I can get good at that, then when we're out looking for acquisitions, I'm specifically looking for businesses where the missing piece is traffic. That's the approach we're heading down when it comes to that acquisitions path.

Joe is a sales guy, I'm a traffic guy. Conversion and traffic. That's why we're good partners. He focuses on one. I focus on the other. If we look at businesses and we go, “This business is pretty solid. The main thing it's missing is traffic. That's the one we're probably going to explore.”

The main thing that is missing is it's got good traffic, but the conversion element isn't quite there. In fact, we had an equity partnership that we did were the main thing was conversions. It had tons of traffic going to it.

Thousands of visitors per day coming to this site. It just wasn't converting. They're making $200 a month off of 2,000 visitors a day. We came in and the first thing we did was we got a new sales letter written.

We went and hired a good copywriter, explained what we were going for, had the entire new sales letter written, switched out the sales letter. It went from $200 a month to $200 a day overnight when we swapped out the sales letter.

The next step was we've got this converting to the traffic that's there, how do we even take the traffic to the next level? We started to put our focus on the traffic.

We went into it knowing, it has got most of the pieces. We have one piece to solve. That piece happens to be one of our specialties. That's the way I think in the future we're going to go into acquisitions is that approach. Does one of our specialties solve the problem that this business has?

I think that's super strong. I know we've talked about this. Joe and I share a lot more in common as far as marketing specialties.

We're more on the creative, the conversion and the connection side. You're the cold-hearted, blackheart traffic monster. I think in the past for myself, it's caused some mental frustration.

I've never felt as though I am a supreme expert in one specific specialty inside marketing. I'm a great copywriter. I'm not the best copywriter.

I'm a great email marketer, but I'm not the best. There are a lot of these things where you just use those internal feelings of self-confidence. It was always hard for me to pick that specialty, but one of the things that I am good at is that resourcefulness, which it will apply well in future acquisitions.

I know where to find the people and the leverage points. I found you guys to help out.

You bought the business before you even got the agreement and then you roped us in there knowing that we'd become partners. It was the wildest thing.

I think you don't give yourself enough credit too. We're all generalists. We all love to learn.

We all have that in common that we're all learning about everything, but what we choose to focus on from an implementation standpoint is not everything we learn.

For me, it's been traffic. For Joe, it's been sales and conversion tactics. From our perspective, what we've always seen you as is this amazing networker, connector. You figure out how to put this piece with this piece where most people don't see those pieces fitting together.

That dot connecting has been one of my strengths. Somebody once called me a catalyst, which I like a lot because it's like a change agent, you drop Brad in and one little thing he does maybe a big leverage thing. It doesn't do all the work.

It just does some of the primary work that gets it moving. What we were talking about, especially the way we structured this deal. When I purchased the site, it goes back to one piece of advice that Jay Abraham I've heard give.

He said one of his favorite mindsets is get control of an asset, figure out what to do with it later. That's what I was trying to do here. I was like, “I'm going to get control of it, then I'm going to figure it out, get my foot in the door.”

If you are resourceful, you work on that resourcefulness and realizing that if you use access, if you use influence, if you connect those dots, there are not too many problems you can't solve. Especially you don't have to know everything if you know the people who do.

I read something. I believe it was in the Building a StoryBrand book by Donald Miller. They were describing this guy's business and he had the same predicament where he felt like he didn't fit into any specific specialty. What he ended up realizing after it was uncovered is that he just knew what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go and he was like what you said.

I feel like we do this in our own specialties, but you do it probably the most often because you're dealing with a lot of businesses. You have a vision for the future and you find the people, the tools or the strategies that are going to be necessary to get there.

You might not know how to do all that because you shouldn't know that, but you know the end game. What's the goal? “In three years, we want to sell this business for $5 million,” or something like that.

Another thing too that I've noticed about you is you're always putting offers out there. You've got a lot of stuff that's out there floating around. You might see an opportunity and you'll go to the guy and say, “Let's do this deal.”

You'll throw it out there. You might find another opportunity, “Let's do this deal.” You're planting a lot of seeds all the time so that someday you may be able to sell them.

I try to play the long game on that. You’ll never know unless you ask because it’s a big thing. Speaking of asking, this is a little bit of a diversion but it made me think. We’re talking about acquisitions, buying companies and uncovering opportunities. If anybody's out there runs a marketing agency, if you're a consultant, if you work with clients.

I find it mind-boggling that people don't ask better questions such as, “Have you ever thought about selling this business?” That's where these opportunities get uncovered from.

A lot of times they go, “What do you have in mind? What would you sell for?” I got a message from a guy saying, “Do you know anybody who buys these types of businesses?” He's asking and I actually do.

It’s a broker connection. That happens all the time with you. Every time we meet with Brad, it's always like, “I've got this cool thing going on right now. It was a great opportunity with this big-name person or this well-connected rich guy.”

There's always something there for you. I think it's perfect for where you're at as long as you own that and know. There are deals where you could get retainers, rev share or equity.

As long as you're there giving value upfront, quick wins but you're helping them and guiding them to whatever that big thing they want. You show them a little bit of path there, which they probably don't know, then everybody wins.

Do you guys want to change it up a little bit?

We're actually figuring out the structure of the show.

This is stuff we would literally sit around and talk about anyway.

Here's what I think would be cool for our Bacon Wrapped Hustle episodes. When we do this, we have three or four questions that we circle back around to that change. One of them that I was thinking is what's one book that you're big on?

What's one tool or software that's helping you in your business? What's one tip or tactic that is working? These are all things that if we ask the same question, it's going to change.

If we have a series of questions, we were gaging what's going on and people will know the progression and what's working for us. I think that would be a cool thing that people would get excited to tune in for. Let’s start with gadgets.

I’m playing with Mevo. It’s the camera-switching live thing. I can easily make some of these edits that you guys are seeing in the pans using my camera on the fly.

We have some professional mics. It’s our podcasting mics, but we're also recording from Mevo audio through his iPhone. That thing saves and transmits to Mevo. It has a little card that stores and you could stream it live.

 

If you guys want to check it out, its GetMevo.com.

We're actually not fans of Mevo. We tried to set up our Mevo first, it didn't work and Brad's did.

Any other gadgets?

We splurged on an iPhone X.

Have you guys heard of this iPhone thing?

The iPhone X is crazy because there's no button on the front. It's all facial recognition.

I love my phone case because it's a wallet and a phone case in one. This is all I ever carry on me.

That case is amazing. It's called Silk on Amazon. It works for any iPhone. I had this for an old phone. I was like, “Matt, you need to get this.” You can throw four or five cards in there.

Do you put cash in there?

No. I think you can.

I don’t carry that much cash. I’ll carry $20.

My gadget that I'm happy with is my little AirPods. The setup process for this was insane. Your phone is sitting on a desk and you pop it open and as soon as you pop it open, the phone says, “Would you like to connect your headphones?” You hit yes and they’re working. That’s how fast it is.

Being delusionally optimistic can be important for entrepreneurs. Click To Tweet

I lost my first set and it was so excruciating because they're $160.

You've spent the money again. That’s the testament. If you go back out and you lose them and you're like, “We’re good that I'm going to spend $150 again.”

That's alien technology as is facial recognition on iPhone. It's getting me a little worried because your iPhone opens up just looking at it. If Brad puts it in front of my face, it's not going to open up.

Do your eyes have to be open?

Somehow you need to be looking at it and the iPhone knows you're looking at the screen or it will even turn off.

I don’t quite understand it because I'll grow my beard long, I'll shave my beard, I'll wear sunglasses. Sometimes I'll wear glasses, sometimes I’m wearing a hat, sometimes I'm not. I’ve never had an issue with it not recognizing me.

Not even that but even with Facebook Live for instance. I think it was in the Mexico house build that I was on. I was down there with my partner, Frank Shamrock. I had the phones and I turned it on him.

Frank is wearing sunglasses and a ballcap. Within the first second that I turned to him he says, “Would you like to tag Frank Shamrock in this?” It was a video. He's wearing a hat and sunglasses. It knew immediately via video how this was.

Think about all the data that’s getting gathered from all sources. It’s amazing. There are some good gadgets.

I started a random tangent. I started walking my dog every day and I was getting sick of the cord dangling down. I'm like, “I need to get some wireless.” I just went for the best of us.

We had this little Fitbit on too. How about different tools or software on the computer?

You guys are familiar, but I've become a very big fan of Kartra. You can go to BaconWrappedBusiness.com/kartra for all your Kartra needs. It is an all in one marketing automation suite that literally replaces everything you need with the exception of a blog.

I still have my WordPress blog, but it is Page Builder, Autoresponder, Help Desk and CRM. It is absolutely everything. It was created by Mike Filsaime, Andy Jenkins, Frank Kern and Hector Yague. A lot of times when a marketer creates software, it's janky.

They threw it together for a cash grab, but this is totally different. This one I'm happy about because I don't have to integrate different things with it. I can just get in. It's pretty intuitive and saved me a lot of money by getting rid of other autoresponders and fake builders.

You get the impression this is what they're planning on doing for the future. Me personally with Kartra, I have a little bit of a love-hate with it. Overall, for the most part, I do like it. There are a few little things that I've wished they'd work out, which we've already shared with Mike and the guys.

There are some things like I can't post tracking pixels in certain places where I want. It’s where you build the members' area which needs a little improvement but other than that, I love everything about it. I'm still big on ThriveCart when it comes to the actual checkout page. There are a lot of features.

 

ThriveCart goes deep on just the checkout page, which is amazing. With Kartra, there are some little things but the tracking on that thing, because we used it for launching the first product for our craft Home Brew site. We were blown away. You send the email through Kartra, your sales page, your order form and your member's area is Kartra. You could track to the minute detail of which emails fired off a sale.

Some of the automation in there is insane. If they watched 25% of the video, send them this, email, tag them with this, put this offer in front of them. If they watched 50% of this video then tag them with this, send them with this video. When you're logged into the member’s area, they've already got the card details on file so you can put a one-click upsell once somebody's logged in to add to their member's area.

It's gangster if you look at some of the stuff they're doing. That's one of the pieces of software tools that I am utilizing a lot. What about you? What do you use?

In our business, Joe and I are pretty much operating in two separate areas. He's probably got different tools than I would talk about.

I think there's a similar one with OmniFocus is one that I know Matt and I both use but that's paired up with the strategy of getting things done, which we had David Allen on the podcast and with Marx Acosta-Rubio. That OmniFocus tool is one that Matt and I both use every single day.

We have it on our phone to capture ideas. Also, this is a good capture device if you know the Getting Things Done methodology, this is a great tool. For me personally, I struggle with organization, streamlining all these different buckets that I'm living in every day and Matt is way more in tune on that stuff naturally.

For me, it's wrangling in this chaos side of my brain to where I can function more so in my own personality. I'm not changing who I am. OmniFocus is great. It's not cheap and I believe it's only on for Apple devices.

I love OmniFocus. That's a great tool. I use it a lot too.

I think Wunderlist or Evernote could be alternatives.

It’s like a task list thing. You unload tasks into an inbox and then you go and organize them into separate projects, folders and stuff. It's good at organizing your brain. The one beef I have with it is the cost. It's expensive. You could buy it on your iMac, MacBook or on a desktop. It's $60 to get the pro version that we use. You go like, “I'm going to add some stuff to it to my phone.”

No, they want you to pay another $60 to get the phone version. If you have an iPad, you’ve got to get an iPad version too. All in you could be $240 into this task management product just to be able to use it across multiple devices but saying that, it's been worth it to me. I've used it so much and it's been badass.

I think the big thing though where people get screwed themselves, which I would have and probably not followed through with OmniFocus is not having a solid strategy, getting things done. Luckily, we have a mentor, Marx, a coach to help us with the little minute details of how he would structure stuff.

Definitely, I would recommend if you think you need some organization, don't just jump into the tool and think it's going to be easy because it won't be. You need to watch their videos. They have some training on getting things done or read the book and then apply it and use that thing as your trusted tool.

What's on that? I know I've read Getting Things Done and I know the basics, probably about 70% of it. It’s the early stage stuff is not bad. I started doing it and I'm like, “I liked the brain dump, I liked the initial organization.” When it gets down to managing it, I’m just not wired.

Did you ever have a tool? Did you have something you did all that organization?

I usually use Todoist, which you can make that work with GTD easy from what I've seen. Some of it's intuitive. I probably need to get go deep on it for a little while. I was reading something on it and some people were talking about GTD and one of the complaints was, it's complex enough to where they were like, “I think David Allen wanted to make it as David Allen.”

“Here's a book and here are the basics. I'm going to give you just enough to what your appetite to get you hooked. I'm going to make it complex enough that you have to give me a bunch of money to learn it.” I am not the most efficient at time management unfortunately. It’s an area that I'm trying to get better at.

That's you and that's my focus is to wrangle that stuff in. Partially because we interviewed with him and I've read the book before. Just like you, it didn't stick because I wasn't applying it. I wasn't making moves with every day. The capture part of it was the most freeing thing that you can possibly do because you take all those open loops out in your head and you put them on paper or in that device.

That's my favorite part. Write it down and then I look at it, I'm like, “Can it magically disappear?”

We go into conversation, you don't have to do every single thing on the page.

That's one thing that David Allen was talking about a lot when we had him on the show. Most people think if you list it down in your inbox, your capture phase, you've got to do this. When you go through and do your review phase where you're looking at everything you've listed out, you could delete half of it if you want.

You could delegate a bunch of it to other people. Just get the ideas out of your head. The whole idea is like a mental freeing thing where you go through this capture phase because you've got a lot of things spinning in your head before you go to bed, first thing in the morning.

Capture everything as it comes to you in your head and gets it out of your brain and when you're in a review phase, you can go, “No, that's crap.” Delete a bunch of things. Delegate a bunch of things. You can create a folder called “Someday maybe,” and you throw it in a folder say, “I'll circle back to that one.”

You review that weekly so you're like, “That's a great idea. Now I can bring it out of that and then apply it to a different folder or project.”

The biggest game-changer about that is the capture phase. Get everything out of your head, either onto paper or in some system.

That's the easiest part for me.

That's the part that is the main thing. It’s the decluttering of the brain. I have two more tools. Both of them I've actually written blog posts on. Joe probably knows it. The first one is a tool by a guy named Paul Clifford and we've had him on the podcast twice called Designrr.

What Designrr does is you can type in the URL of a blog post and it will convert that entire blog post into a PDF version. You can use that as an opt-in for that blog post. Surprisingly, it works well. Just to give somebody a PDF version of a blog post, there's something psychological where they think, “If I have this PDF, I will read it.”

It's a great opt-in. It works.

They released this feature. They call it Designrr AI. What it is, is you can actually link onto a YouTube video, plug in a podcast episode. It transcribes the whole thing for you. As you're listening back to the transcription to double-check it, you click one button, it will take screenshots of that videos inside of your transcripts.

It places links in there and the websites you mentioned.

How have I not seen this because I used Designrr?

 

The AI feature is on their premium.

It’s not the cheap version. It's not that much more.

Basically, it’s an automated transcription. It will miss some things here and there, but you go back through, you listen to it and you correct it yourself.

That reminds me of two other tools that I use. One of them is Trint and the other is Otter.ai. Otter.ai is the one I’ve been using. You upload audio or a video file and it automatically transcribes things. You hit play and you can hear the words go so you can see where it is. Obviously, you can edit it if you want to change it and it will show you where it is in the audio, but it's not doing a screenshot.

That's the thing with Designrr. It does its transcription thing in minutes. He was explaining Amazon's AI, Google. You could tap into their APIs and their technology. That's how it's transcribing a lot of that and it's constantly learning.

The tool gets smarter. As you go through and you transcribe stuff, when you fix little errors, the tool is getting smarter based on that information.

Even random names. We tested this with one of James Schramko's podcast. I think it was Scott from Wicked Reports. His last name is Desgrosseilliers but I would never be able to spell that thing and it nailed it. I was like, “How did it do that? Still it's not perfect and Paul would be the first to admit that.

It doesn't have to be on YouTube. Let's say you make a tutorial video that shows you how to set up your first Facebook ad.

You make this video and you're like, “You're going to click on this button in the top left corner, you're going to scroll, you're going to click this button that says Create Ad Here,” and you're explaining the whole process. Before if you've got the transcriptions, they're not that helpful. If you look at the transcription, it says click here and then goes to this link over here.

That's what you're showing on the screen, but it's irrelevant in the transcription. If you throw in little screenshots in there, you now have an eBook that you can sell with that tutorial. This is a product and let's say I want to make a Facebook ad course.

I can go and sell the eBook version of my Facebook ad course for $20. If you want to upgrade to the video version and make a little bump offer for $20 more, we'll send you the actual video. Doesn't it pick out different speakers too?

It can. It will name them based off of what tag and then it will say like, “That was Joe all the way through here. That was Brad here and Matt.”

As podcasters, it comes in super handy because the last ten episodes that we've transcribed, we've just thrown them into Designrr.

I will put it on Evergreen Profits. I'm sure you'll take it to.

I’ve got one more tool called ConvertBox. I'm sure you're familiar with Thrive Themes and OptinMonster. There are a bunch of opt-in tools out there. We started testing ConvertBox and our email opt-ins doubled. Exit-intent popups and a little slide-in, the Welcome, Matt that scrolls down from the top of this screen and all of that stuff.

This one, there's not a lot of variation in the actual design of the opt-in form. You get what they give you. The opt-in form that they give you doubled our opt-in rate and we didn't do anything. We didn't change the traffic source.

We didn't change the image on the little opt-in form. We didn't change the copies. Everything was identical. We just switched from one tool to the other, used their default design that they give you and our opt-in rates doubled. There are a few cool features in there.

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They've got a conditional targeting. If they've seen a blog post, put this opt-in form in front of them. If they came in from a Google search, put this opt-in in front of them.

If they came in from a Facebook Ad, put this opt-in in front of them. All sorts of dynamic opt-in boxes based on previous things that they've done. If they read this blog post and they're in Germany, show them this opt-in form. If they've read this blog post and they're in the US, show them this opt-in. All sorts of conditional opt-in forms that you can do.

This is the thing that I liked. There's an option to make it based on tags. If you're using WordPress, all I have to do is create a tag. One of our opt-ins is a Marketing Stack Cheat Sheet. All the tools we use in our business. If I give it the tag Marketing Stack Cheat Sheet, any blog posts that have that tag on it, this opt-in form will pop up.

You tag the blog post with Marketing Stack Cheat Sheet.

All I have to do is every time we make a new blog post, we're starting to use unique lead magnets as well, but we've got five or six default lead magnets that we'll use based on what the content of that post is.

If we talked to a financial guy, like a Phil Town or some of the cryptocurrency guys we've had on the podcast. We've got one opt-in that's relevant to those types of conversations. If there’s a mindset guy, we've got a different opt-in.

All we have to do to make that opt-in work is we published the blog post to the podcast to go live and then I give it a tag with whatever lead magnet I want it to pop up and it's on there.

What are you guys mainly doing for your more unique lead magnets, especially as they apply to individual episodes?

We make a cheat sheet, like a CliffsNotes version of the episode.

We have a whole process. Patty and our team do that.

She manages all of our content, our show notes. She does transcriptions. What she does and this is easily something you could have anyone on your team do or hire it out. She listens to every episode, takes extensive notes.

I think hand writes all this stuff. She's jamming it in her brain where she knows this stuff and then she creates a cheat sheet, which is a couple of pages or longer. Those are like the CliffNotes version of every podcast. Usually, we'll highlight a process or something that step-by-step someone can download and then implement.

Do you know approximately what the per episode conversion rate is on that, at least on your blog posts?

Is it on the unique ones?

Yes, in general. The people who land on your page and look at it.

On the unique ones, I haven't looked at the numbers, but I would say our old numbers before we were using ConvertBox, we were getting a 3% opt-in rate. Now, we're getting 7%.

That's literally without any customizations of anything.

A 3% to 7% of the unique opt-ins where it's like, “We talked to Brad Costanzo. He talked about his seven-step process to buy a business. Here's the cheat sheet to get those seven steps.” We might see 10% of the people that go to that page. It's a little boost over what you'd see on our default opt-ins.

 

I want to talk about books. What else did you want to talk about?

Books and also a killer tip tactic that’s working in your business.

Let’s do that. Who wants to go first?

Let's start with books and then we'll end with the tactics because I think most people came for the tactics and we're putting it to the end.

The one I'm reading one of a couple is Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. I'm about three-quarters of the way there. The thing is absolutely amazing. If you're trying to figure out how to actually tap into your customer's minds in a totally different way that most people don't unless you're an experienced copywriter that knows all this thing.

This will give you frameworks and it's like a free thing online. You can map out and swipe and use if you're writing emails, sales copy, your videos, any kind of presentation to people you want to influence. I think the biggest a-ha was you're talking to not only their external problems if someone's trying to make money with whatever, “You want to make more money, great.”

That's surface level. That's not what they're feeling inside. It's the internal struggles, the external. It's the world struggles in their daily lives and how the world should be.

If you could speak to all those and give a clear call to action that follows up where they can trust you. You can empathize with these folks but also show your authority. You combine those two things in the little templates he gives you, you’re on fire with anything you're selling.

I'm reading this book and then I have my OmniFocus out. I'm like, “That's something I can implement. That's a little tweak on the sales page.” I read this. It was like, “Give them three steps anytime you're trying to tell someone to do something.” Let's say they want to buy a product. Figure out where you're at, what you're looking for.

You give them a list of things that they can invest and say, “This is what I want to learn.” You say, “Join the course and then after the fact, now we're going to walk you through these couple of steps here that are the common next steps after purchase.”

It helps answer objections that people normally would ask or maybe never ask and just go away and not buy. It’s almost like answering this and you're growing trust prior to ever even asking them to do something. It’s three sentences. That's one way to push them over the edge without any real selling.

I'm actually reading Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, but that's not the book that I'm going to mention. We’ll go to have him on the show and we'll dive deep into that book. I'm only a couple of chapters in, so I don't want to give a full review yet. The book that I was going to mention is going to be a nerdy data-driven book called Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites by Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson. This was recommended by André Chaperon and I grabbed it and went, “This book is amazing.”

We delineated things in our business, Matt and I, we were talking and this is exactly where his head should be. This is where we've shifted.

I thought Matt was more of a traffic guy.

I do split tests a lot. I am the split tester as well.

I'll pipe him my ideas. I'll give him some copy and we'll work on it together.

This book is all about split testing and conversion optimization, but I think most marketers that have been around for a while will agree with this. You shouldn't be split testing minor changes. Most people go, “I'm going to split test orange versus blue button.”

We might see a teeny lift in conversions from one color to another but the big idea of this book is test wildly different ideas, test talking to this market versus this market test. When you're driving traffic through ads, test this targeting versus this targeting.

Many people want to go to this granular place of, “I'm going to test this sub-headline against this subheadline or I'm going to test a blue button versus an orange button.” I feel like those are very marginal improvements.

Let's say you're getting a million visitors a month. That stuff's probably very valid. For the rest of us who aren't getting a million visitors a month to our website, you want to test very dramatically different pages and offers. This book is loads of ideas of things to test.

I think I actually have that in my Kindle. It was because of either your recommendation or André’s.

André emailed his list about it and I went and read the description and I'm like, “This is the book I need.”

A few of the books off the top of my head that I'm reading because that's the easiest. I'm reading Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. It’s highly recommended.

It’s really good stuff. I am reading a book called Goal-Free Living. It's an interesting argument about why fuzzy goals are better than SMART goals, which is the Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Timely or whatever it is.

I've always operated by very fuzzy goals in my own life. This has some interesting concepts about instead of using a map, use a compass. Instead of just goals, use aspirations. It’s a little bit of language changing. It's not a marketing book, but it's general mindset.

It’s something we all relate to. It's tough sometimes, maybe it's easier for some people to figure out, “Where are we going?” What is that big thing we're after? I doubt it's always going to be the same thing for the rest of our lives. I like the whole analogy of using a compass and then you talk about how its ship goes to its destination. It's not usually a straight line, it's doing the zigzag thing and that's where a compass comes in. If you have a fuzzy idea of, “I want to go that direction.”

If you’re on a map and you've got one path, you get off track and that map is no longer applicable for where you're going, a compass will get you there. It's like, “That’s still where I need to be.

I can do it a different way and it's a little bit more adaptable.” If you have a map and a compass, it's probably a little bit better and I think that's key. The third book that I'm reading is called The Third Door and it's by Alex Banayan.

It's an interesting book where this guy interviewed and studied some of the world's top leaders from Bill Gates to Warren Buffett. This whole thing was to find out what was one of the keys that unlocked their career and what was those pivotal moments?

What he realized is that there’s the first door in which is the traditional method “work hard and get in.” There's the back door, which is, “I knew somebody.” A lot of times there's that third door where it takes some ingenuity, some creativities, brute force, some luck and all of those combined.

It's like, “That's the way in.” Sometimes it's it can read like an adventure story the way it happened. Not everybody had it handed to them and not everybody just worked and took the traditional route.

A lot of times it's a way you're like, “I didn't even know that.” My Kindle says I'm 19% of the way through. He set up the premise and he's off to his adventures. That's a super good book. I've got a lot more in there, but those are the ones I'm reading.

You said Steven Spielberg's one of those examples.

It’s how he got his career going. A lot of times, not in an unethical way, but sneak your way in. One of my clients Jesse Itzler wrote a book called Living with a SEAL. He talks about how he got his first record album.

The way he got his record album is a white Jewish rap star back in the early ‘90s. He was working at a recording studio cleaning floors and doing not much else and trying to get a demo here and there when he could. There was a rapper named Dana Dane who I wasn't familiar with, but I think he had a couple of big hits back at that time.

He had left a demo tape there and Jesse grabbed it. He knew that this guy who's a record producer that his favorite artist was Dana Dane. If I remember the story right, he called him up and he's like, “This is Jesse with Dana Dane and we want to get this demo to you.” He was saying, he is Dana Dane.

She's like, “Mr. Ross can see you now.” He goes in and he's basically acting like he's Dana Dane and he's not, but he finally gets his foot in the door. He's like, “No, that's not me. He's on his way. While we're waiting, let me show you my demo.” He got to a record deal. You got to finagle your way in there sometimes.

It’s going to be a little schemy and thinking out of the box.

Did he explain that story in Living with a SEAL?

I've also got some videos of him explaining it. It's super cool, but Living with a SEAL is a great book.

What else have we got?

I can take this all over the place. I have some random questions we can talk about just for fun. What would your ideal business life look like?

 

I think we all have a similar answer to that. We're all in a pretty good agreement. At least we've chatted about it as podcasting is doing stuff like this. Podcasting for all of us, it's a perfect opportunity to chat.

Talking to cool people about business and stuff and getting paid?

It's exactly what you just said. You almost hack your way into different circles too. For us, I know with our podcast, a lot of the times it's selfish and our guests know that. It's not that we hide it.

We can instantly grow our network and that reach all that stuff you were talking about that enables you to get in, maybe learn a strategy, but also get in with a circle of people that you would've never had the chance to like David Allen for instance, the author of Getting Things Done.

That would've never happened without a podcast. Personally, that would be a great business. Have a great business going that we love, that we're working in our fields very well. The podcasting is something. Look at Joe Rogan.

I’m with you there. Let's say there was some rich investor that says like, “I love you. I'm going to pay you a bunch of money. You do whatever you want.” If you just want to give us money because you like us, this is what I would do.

Legitimately, I would pretty much go all-in on podcasting. My dream podcast would not necessarily be about business and marketing all the time. I would talk about it from time to time, but I would love to have that Joe Rogan style podcast where I talk to interesting people all the time.

Sometimes it's about business, sometimes it's about whatever I want. Sometimes it's about travel. With Joe Rogan, it's a lot about UFC, which I'm not as into so probably would get rid of that element, but he talks about substances. I find it all fascinating.

Mine is similar. The only thing that makes me think that that wouldn't be perfect is if money's no object and I'm got to do this, I don't like the idea of being tied to it all the time like, “I’ve got to get it out.” Tonight Show host or something like that would be phenomenal. Be Jimmy Fallon, but you're also tied to it. Taking a month or two off is harder to do. With podcasting it's easier because you can back load a lot of episodes.

We're also working with the travel podcasting kit.

We have a great process where you can hire it out, editing, uploading, show notes.

My ideal scenario would be I would have a studio, probably not similar to the one we're in where there would be a big table. The mics would be permanently mounted there and I would have a studio guy whose job is to hang out in the corner and make sure the audio is coming out.

I agree with you because this is the stuff I like to do the most is create, connect and then explore different opportunities. My ideal business is the one where maybe I've got interests in advising on multiple businesses that create a pretty steady stream of semi-passive residual income that allows me to swing for the fences and chase new blue oceans, uncharted territory, opportunities and new projects.

I've come to the realization that I need to be creating in order to be happy. If I'm not and when I'm just working behind the scenes and doing stuff, I can be effective but I'm not happy. I do like creating, whether it's writing, doing videos, doing audios and I need to do more of it. It's one of the things that I've been telling myself that is a commitment.

I'm in that same boat. For me, I'm the happiest when I'm trying to solve problems. When I'm trying to figure out like, “Why isn't this converting?” or “How do I get more traffic on it that we haven't tapped yet?” I like being experimental all the time and if I'm experimenting and testing new ideas and testing new things, that's where I'm happiest.

I also love interesting discussion. That's my favorite thing out of our entire business. Everything we do in our business, the podcast, hands down, that's the one thing that I would never let anybody take away from me.

There have been times I thought about quitting and I've thought about like, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore.” You go through the ups, the downs and the lows.

It's a marathon.

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In general, I wouldn't quit.

That’s the thing with podcasting. You had a longer show, the Multiply Authority podcast. We started back in 2010 and definitely didn't have the long-term game. We thought it would be a business.

Our first podcast, the Online Income podcast. I think we released three episodes and gave up on it maybe a year later.

I had two podcasts at the time. I had the Business and Blogs podcast and I had the Online Income podcast, which was cohosted with Joe. The Business and Blogs podcast made it to about episode fifteen. The Online Income podcast made it to about episode three.

Joe and I reunited to do Evergreen Wisdom podcast. We had episode seventeen with that one and then I did Beyond the Hype with Josh. We did about twelve episodes with that. The Multiply Authority podcast, I made it to episode 70 and then I talked to Joe, I said, “Do you want to cohost a podcast with me?” That podcast essentially got rebranded as Hustle and Flowchart, but kept going.

We had a different intention going into it. We're like, “This cannot be the business.”

In most cases, a podcast is not a business. There are a few people who can knock that part.

Which is why I said someone used to pay me to be able to do it, even sponsorship money.

Are you not thinking about going to be doing Patreon?

I've thought about it. We haven't played with it. I've talked to some people. Some of the guys we met with who do the Optimal Living Daily Podcast, they use Patreon. They were telling us it does okay, but it's nothing.

They do have sponsors. I feel like to make good money off sponsorships, you've got to be up there, you're the top 5% of podcasts.

They're amazing because they have built a business out of their podcast, but they do it in a very strategic way. They're leveraging a lot of different platforms and people, so check them out. It's amazing.

We met with them up in Irvine because they know how to get the eyeballs. They have millions of people every single month listening to their podcast, which is outrageous to me. They don’t know the conversion elements. They don't know the marketing and how to scale the money side of the thing which is why they came to us and we came to them for the visibility of our sales stuff.

We both have areas that we think can help each other out. It’s very symbiotic, but still it’s the coolest part of the business.

It's one of the things I've more so doubled down on as opposed to just treating it. I get my podcast love, but not as much as I should because you get busy running a business and making money doing everything else.

When I look back at all of the amazing opportunities and things that I'm doing in my business and my life, 80% or 90% of them are a direct result of the podcast.

The network and the connections we have, a lot of them were built before the podcast, but the podcast was just exponential growth.

 

Those connections connected us to people at a different level or circles. It doesn't matter how influential there, but it's different circle and it's a big web we're building.

What's interesting too is when we go to events. We go to Traffic & Conversion, we go to a handful of events throughout the year. I used to be like, “You’re Matt the WordPress classroom guy.” That was the first business I ever had.

I merged and became Learn to Blog with Bradley Will. People knew me as the blogging guy or the WordPress guy for the longest time. Joe was the video guy. Joe had a video agency, so everybody knew him as the video guy.

Now we go to events and everybody’s like, “You're the Hustle and Flowchart guys.” The podcast essentially becomes our business identity. People know Hustle and Flowchart brand more than they know the Evergreen Profits brand.

I have times when I wanted to change my brand from Bacon Wrapped Business. It's a little cheesy and funny, but it's also memorable and everybody says they love it.

You should get some bacon cologne and then when you walk around at events, “Does somebody smell bacon? It's Brad Costanzo.” Everybody knows when you walk in the room, even if you're not even near him.

I think this might be a good wrap up question. Let's each share a tip or tactic or something that's working well in our business. Let's start with Brad. It doesn't have to be something you created either because I'm going to share something that I learned from somebody else.

I've been working on a content framework that is starting to work well. I'm utilizing it with clients.

Content is keying and building a brand out there that tells a story, builds an audience, people who know, like and trust you is hard or it can be challenging if you don't have a framework. I used to tell clients to create micro snackable content. The hard part about that is that they were fumbling around not exactly knowing what to do.

I've created this framework whereby it starts with a brainstorm and then they slowly filtered out to what is the general theme of the content you want to create. The pillars of your message, does it support? Usually, there are four or five pillars.

There may be twenty different types of things that you can create and then of those, is there a point you're trying to make? Is there a metaphor or a story that can back up that point? Is there a moral to that story?

Is there a call to action, especially if you're trying to do content branding type videos? It doesn't have to be opt-in to get my eBook. It can be, “Next time you're going through this, I want you to stop, think, do this or write this down.” t can be an action you can get the person to take without you.

By doing that, you might be giving them a result in advance that they can apply and then have a good rapport with you. It's starting to make it a lot easier for the clients that I'm working with going, “Now I can see how I can start to distribute different types of content that support my message.”

I would see a lot of the focus that I've been doing, this is something that Matt and I have siloed ourselves into these positions where we feel we're the best at in our business. What I've done a lot of are the sales.

It's communications with prospects also with buyers, previous customers, a cross-sale opportunities. The big thing is the personalization of the sales process or even the follow-up. I'll do live chats all the time. A constant thing that I have in my daily tasks are follow-ups. That's going to involve email, the forums that we have, our member’s area, Voxer access. We have a private access area for higher-paying clients.

We have ManyChat. It's the live chat, Messenger chat. We have for Facebook groups. All those things. I pretty much have these as lists that every day I go through. The ManyChat might be multiple times a day. In those chats, I'm not only talking with them. I have some macros so I'm not making things up every single time. It’s a time efficiency thing.

I use Loom videos. I think I learned Loom from you originally and I use those when I see an opportunity where I know this person's going to watch it for one. If they're halfway engaged, I'm probably not going to do this. I'll shoot a three-minute video and they'll say like, “How does this work in the back end of ThriveCart?”

I'll shoot a Loom video, fire up the camera. I'll have my face on there and complete this video, personalize for them with their name in there and a call to action at the end.

I’ll give them a good reason to follow up and actually ask me a question because I always try to create an open loop in every single message. It forces them to respond. It's usually a simple question. In the Loom video, the title always put their name and the date. If I know it's going to be multiple videos, there's probably a number after the date.

I know exactly when they view the video. It will kick me an email or notification. If they don't respond I'm not going to be like, “I saw the video, Bob.” I'll at least go after him a little harder or ask him specific questions about that video. I've screenshotted things and they're like, “You just gave me 90% more education before even buying the course.” They’re like, “I don't even know you but I trust you so much more. Where do I buy?”

This concept of the ManyChat plus Loom is insane. You're going and people are asking a question about ThriveCart or our traffic course or something that we're selling. Joe will be like, “Let me explain it to you quick.” He'll go and hit record on Loom really quick. He'll go in the back end of ThriveCart and he is like, “Bob, thanks for your question. Here are the answers.”

You can drop that into ManyChat or Facebook Messenger?

You grab the Loom link and you'd drop it straight into ManyChat and say, “Here's the video I shot for you.” It's personalized to him. Those people always come back and go, “Thanks so much for doing that.

That is amazing. You guys go way above and beyond.” The other aspect that's so cool is these people are writing our sales messages for us. These questions that are coming up, those become objections that we put on our sales messages that we use in our emails.

The feedback they give would be way easier if this happened or you did it this way. We use all of that feedback. For our traffic course, people ask questions about the traffic course. They might say, “Do you teach how to do branding videos?” No, but that's great feedback. Maybe we'll add that in the next and we’ll sell them on the fact that because you're interested in doing it anyone branding videos, maybe that will be the next little tip video we throw in there.

You're saying that listening to your customers and prospects actually is a useful part of marketing.

It blows me away if people don't have live chat on their conversion pages or on their checkout page at a minimum, but sales page, we usually try to do both of those. We're not going to put them on a blog post. We'll put a link to start a messenger chat with us, which comes from ManyChat. It's a unique link.

Kick them over an intro message that says something like, “Bob, do you have a question about our traffic course? Fire me a message and I'll get back to you.” It’s as simple as that.

Every single thing starts out that way. More often than not, every day I probably have ten new chats going. That's without a bunch of pushing to the chats too, but it's because of an option. It's an easy way to get a sale.

We're insane optimizers. We use Visual Website Optimizer. We use tons of different split testing tools and we're constantly optimizing and testing things. The data we get from these chats and from the responses people give on these videos is a system to gather objections to handle in our sales message and turn into testimonials too.

This isn't a live chat but this is the whole sales and looking at your customers. Remember I took a screenshot of ThriveCart buyers through us and Mike Michalowicz was one of those guys, the Profit First/Clockwork author and that's how we're getting him on the podcast. We're getting on his podcast. That one, he didn't get through live chat but it was us always looking at who's buying our stuff.

Following up with those folks even after the sale to make sure that they are taken care of and maybe there's a cross-sale opportunity because there's always a way to connect your products. The best way to do that is reaching out, maybe shoot them a Loom video and thank you for their purchase. That's something I want to start doing is more stuff on the back end.

Take a look at BombBomb for that. It's an app on your phone and your desktop. This is like an in-person video, you're not doing a screen share. There are all these automation and stuff. What it will do is I might hold up my phone or I'll get on my laptop and say, “Joe, thanks for buying this product.

I hope you get a lot out of it. Let me know if you have any questions and then I can have it automatically sent to you.” BombBomb will integrate with your email so it will send it out, but automatically create a little GIF of you talking and then it implants in the email.

Whenever they click it, you'll know if they opened the email, if they clicked it, and if they watch the video, and then you can set up automation.

Technically you could do that also in stuff like Kartra and other things, but it takes a little more time. BombBomb is set up specifically for that. Do you get notifications on your cell phone like of a sale?

In certain cases, yes.

Who gave me this idea was our mutual friend, Michael O'Neal from Solopreneur Hour. You can't do this if you're selling thousands of products a day. If somebody buys his course. I don't know if he uses BombBomb yet, but he should. He'll see it. He'll just pull out his phone and do a quick little video, “I saw you buy this. Thanks. I hope you like it.” He manually emails it to them or texts them.

Did he mention their name in the video?

He texted it to them. There's an app that allows you to have a free text message number. They don't have your cell phone, but it's a secondary text line.

Is it like Twilio?

It's not Twilio but maybe something. It's on your phone and it's easy to do. He'll text it to them because he'll see their phone number and their thing. They'll text you, “I saw you bought my course on how to be cool. Thank you very much.” He goes, “I just generated so much rapport.”

 

He does mention their name. James Schramko does that.

When we joined his membership immediately, that day on a Sunday, James was like, “Who’s at the mall?”

You’re getting 20 or 30 sales a day. That’s not hard to do. If each video is twenty seconds long, it's nothing.

What you do is you create a video that has your message and then you make a two-second video that says, “Brad.” You're like wearing totally different clothes and the second half of the video or what you do is with the iPhone thing where you look like a unicorn that's talking.

My tactic tip actually comes from a mutual friend of all of ours, Curt Maly. Hopefully, he doesn't mind that I share this but we're having him on the show so he'll probably share it on the show again.

He’s already been on my show.

Did he share the HOT7? Did he talk about that?

He did.

I'm going to mention the hot seven because that thing is been working insanely. One of the comments that we've been getting a lot from people is, “I'm seeing you everywhere. I get on Facebook and it's a different video. You guys must be shooting ten videos a day because I can't get rid of you.”

This is the power of the HOT7 technique that Curt teaches. Essentially what it is, and I could totally butcher it, but this is how I'm using it. This is a Facebook ad tactic. You create a whole bunch of audiences on Facebook of people who has engaged with you in the last seven days. You have anybody who's visited your website in the last seven days.

Anybody who's liked any of your Facebook posts in the last seven days. Anybody who's purchased your product in the last seven days and on and on. You make twenty different HOT7 audiences of people who have interacted in the last seven days. When you make little social media videos, you boost them for $1 per day and you target this hot seven audience.

Anybody who visits your website, now when they get on Facebook, all of a sudden they're seeing ten different videos from you. Anybody who likes one of your posts on Facebook or likes one of your ads on Facebook, all of a sudden they're seeing videos from you everywhere.

You can use this HOT7 audience too when you have offers to sell. When you have an offer and you want to go after some low hanging fruit, these are your most recently engaged people, you put those offers in front of the HOT7.

Just that little tactic of creating these audiences of people who have engaged on your website, your Facebook fan page, your Instagram, any of that in the last seven days, and targeting them with all of your videos, all of your blog posts, all of your podcast episodes, everything for $1 a day. It blows up your brand overnight. You can do this depending on how many dollars a day of ads you're setting up. $20 a day and you're everywhere.

With that and to back it up, what were the numbers you just shared with me? Check out the 30-day numbers based off of this strategy right here.

When you're inside the Facebook ad dashboard, most people look at impressions. They look at how many times has this ad been seen. Impressions isn't a number I cared that much about. What impressions are, if somebody sees it three times, one person that counts is three impressions. There's another number in the Facebook ad that I think you have to turn on, which is reach.

Reach is how many people have seen your ad. If somebody sees it five times, that counts as one person in reach.

I actually ran the numbers of how many people have viewed our videos. We’re about 149,000 people. Let's call it a 30-day period, our Facebook videos, our blog posts, pretty much all of the ads that we're running on Facebook have been seen by 150,000 people and we were paying $0.03 a view.

Content is king, and building a brand that tells a story builds an audience. Click To Tweet

Curt and I went into that whole paradigm shift quite a bit, which is a topic for a whole other episode. It’s the idea that stops thinking about what's my cost per click, but it’s what's the cost to get somebody to view most or all of my content? All of a sudden you start thinking, “It only costs me $0.50 to get somebody to watch a ten-minute video.

We're running these for $1 a day. You set up one of these videos and we put it out there for $1 a day. What Facebook's going to do is they're going to try to get you as many views for that $1 as possible. You can do with the same concept with $10 a day but it won't be as effective because Facebook goes, “We have more money to play with.”

If you go and set this at $1 a day for these ads and you target this HOT7 audience, you're getting $0.02, $0.03 video views and all of the sudden you're getting 150,000 people have seen your stuff. Here's what most people don't realize and this was a conversation we dove deep with Billy Gene on, was that the brand is so much more impactful than most people think.

There was a time in the internet marketing space where people went, “Branding is BS. Don't focus on branding. It's a waste of time.” We've found quite the opposite. That branding has actually been more impactful for us than a lot of the direct response stuff we're doing because branding makes everything so much easier.

If we're seeing by 150,000 people and people are just seeing us everywhere. If you get into our ecosystem and you've seen seven videos from us and they're like, “These guys are fun, these guys are cool, they're goofing off, they're teaching me stuff. This is awesome. I love these guys.” When I put an offer in front of you, you're going to be a lot more likely to buy because you've been seeing us everywhere.

If I'm selling you on a traffic course and I put an offer in front of you that says, “Buy our traffic course.” You're probably going to be thinking, “This traffic course is probably pretty good because I see these guys everywhere.” That's the power of these branding campaigns of these $0.03 views and we're getting in front of 150,000 people.

That's 150,000 people that know who we are when we put an offer in front of them and we're that much more likely to make the sale.

What I talked about with the tactics is working for me, which is that content framework of what content to create. It's with this exact same thing in mind because if we know that snackable micro-content that builds your brand and educates your audience is what works, what content do we have to create to reverse engineer to make that happen?

I've talked to a lot of people on the phone and in the live chat. Almost everybody listens to our podcast. They've seen our videos, they've seen our ads for different affiliate products too and it's great to hear this because it's confirmation in this part of talking to your customers too.

You'll learn that stuff that's actually working because a lot of this, you can't track every single one of these videos. We are starting to with the Wicked Reports, but that's a slower game. It’s cool to talk to someone and they're like, “I listened to every one of your episodes or I love ThriveCart. I see your ads everywhere for that.”

My favorite thing to hear is when I get messages for people that are like, “You guys must be spending millions because I'm seeing you everywhere.” I was like, “No, I spent $1 just to get in front of you.”

Thank you for reading. If you’re a subscriber of the show, but not to Hustle and Flowchart, go smash the subscribe button and vice versa. If you guys want to get ahold of me, you can always reach out to me directly at AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com.

Fire me an email at Joe@EvergreenProfits.com.

We're going to do this again next time.

Thanks so much for reading Hustle Wrapped Flowchart with Bacon on the side. It was a great episode. Thanks, Brad, for joining us. Thanks to me and Joe for joining us.

If you haven't already, go to BaconWrappedBusiness.com subscribe there and HustleAndFlowchart.com and subscribe there.

Important Links:

• Evergreen Profits
• Hustle and Flowchart
• BaconWrappedBusiness.com/kartra
• OmniFocus
• Getting Things Done
• Todoist
• Designrr
• Trint
• Otter.ai
• ConvertBox
• Thrive Themes
• OptinMonster
• Clockwork
• Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites
• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
• Goal-Free Living
• The Third Door
• Living with a SEAL
• Voxer
• ManyChat
• Loom
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Profit First
• BombBomb
• Twilio
• Curt Maly – Previous episode on Bacon Wrapped Business podcast

About The Guest: Matt Wolfe

Moxie, that’s the first glimpse Matt Wolfe got of what it took to be an entrepreneur. He learned it from his father, the man who started his own company with a wife, three kids and no back-up plan. Naturally, with a guy like that in charge, Matt couldn’t really fall too far from that tree.

Pair Matt’s role model up with the two guys he calls his favorite authors, Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins, and it’s a natural to see why he was always destined to be his own boss. Some of the biggest lessons Matt learned from his role models and favorite thought provokers included how to manage people effectively, delegate with confidence and create efficient systems.

Of course, those lessons aren’t the easiest to internalize. Matt admits his biggest weakness is not letting stuff go because he knows he’s pretty damn efficient at getting things done. He feels if he could just delegate more in the business and be comfortable letting go of clutter in his life, he could reach his goals at a much quicker pace. Guess it makes it easy to understand why his primary focus right now is to let stuff go, doesn’t it?

About The Guest: Joe Fier

Joe Fier always knew he was meant to live “big,” something he shared with his mom when he was a young grasshopper. He looked up to her as the most successful person he knew, who always had her shit together and got paid very well to do the work she did. He promised her one day he would make her proud and make more money than she did. Let’s just say Joe has one proud momma who’s thrilled for his success these days.

So, how did Joe Fier become the son of a beaming mother? What’s his secret sauce for success? I’m guessing it would be his superpower, the ability to befriend just about anyone. Taking that one step further, Joe’s goal of wanting to be remembered as a friend, as the guy who made people’s days a little better, more fun or interesting is definitely a major contributing factor also.

Even from his first steps into the working world, Joe took a great approach to make the best of it. When he took those first jobs at Burger King, then Famous Footwear, he made sure to recruit his friends to come work at the same place. He figured if he had to get paid he might as well have fun doing it, and that’s exactly the type of environment he created as a young employee turned “recruiter.”

• Here’s How »

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