TTE Q&A Call 1, Modules 0-2

There’s a list of questions and answers with time stamps, as well as a full transcript below.

Questions & Answers

1. Question: How much of the backend needs to be developed before we start marketing to our potential clients? I have almost too many options right now and I’m trying to figure out what is the best way to go. Do I need to decide now or can I gather information from clients and adapt as I go? Just now I have an opportunity to build my coaching practice. My initial offerings are various reports that help you learn things like behavioral styles, communication styles, work styles, and other styles depending on the reports. That and deciding on how I want the coaching pipeline to work. If I want to do a Mastermind with John Maxwell’s materials, that’s an expert in that space, or some other thing that may be more valuable to my clients.

Question (7:35-3:11) | Answer (3:12-6:14)

2. Question: (Followup from above question) What is the best way … I guess you answered that too with the email question, so would you just dive in after you get people to buy the report or however I do it? Dive in and just interact and look for where the greatest value is to serve the client base?

Question (8:04-8:20) | Answer (8:05-14:23)

3. Question: The person who submitted this question wants eventually to have a business that’s generating $5,000 a month after taxes and he currently has a $47 product. That’s the only product, it’s a front end product, it’s not really a direct response model, it’s much more of an eCommerce model because he just wants to sell this $47 product to get to that $5,000 a month after taxes, and he wants to know how to estimate his traffic cost to do that.

Question (14:46-15:15) | Answer (15:17-18:52)

4. Question: This is about LBC and the traffic engine. So LBC is based on a low cost content for this particular person, [inaudible 00:19:09] low cost continuity program. Like the question is, what about a backend? How does that factor in?

Question (18:56-19:15) | Answer (19:16-22:20)

4. Question: You said that Google’s users think in terms of ‘what is?’, ‘how do I?’, ‘what’s the best way to?’. Could you please be explicit about what questions to keep in mind when writing copy for Facebook? What are the questions in the minds of Facebook users when they’re looking for entertainment or as I said, information on education?

Question (22:26-22:45) | Answer (22:51-24:30)

5. Question: What we offer is in three areas, user experience and digital transformation, website development and support, digital marketing and SEO. My thoughts are, will I need to pick one area to concentrate on as the offer is quite different?

Question (24:38-25:01) | Answer (25:04-27:42)

6. Question: My offer is generally a higher ticket price item. I do have lower cost items like audits, marketing plans, et cetera. However, ultimately we want to build a customer’s website and then have them transition through the other offers.” He says, “I have a value ladder-ish.” I love that. “I’m not really sure what my question is here other than the higher ticket price and quantifying whether my tactics are working has been quite challenging or downright annoying. Preach brother, preach.

Question (27:45-28:14) | Answer (28:16-31:25)

7. Question: My first question is about systems theory. When I read about it in André’s work it intuitively made a lot of sense. At the same time it sounds like using mostly your gut feeling to know how to optimize your system. I hardly get enough traffic to run a statistically relevant split test to decide on a headline. If I wanted to test the impact of one element on the entire system, I would need an incredible amount of traffic running through the system. Yes, sure, you use principle number running through the system. Yes, sure. You use principle number five, focus on the long term happiness of your customer and a lot of decisions are being taken care of, but I could guess that you still would want to know what sales page converts better. You would want to eliminate any pushy, sleazy elements from the sales page that artificially increased sales, but if you have two equally honest sales page pages, wouldn’t you want to test which one performs better?

Question (31:35-32:27) | Answer (32:32-35:04)

8. Question: A good point to rely on the big data of Facebook, which means that going for a sales conversion is completely different than asking Facebook for leads, but initially when you don’t have enough buyers on your Facebook pixels, don’t you have to first optimize for leads?

Question (35:10-35:23) | Answer (35:24-37:19)

9. Question: The challenge is to keep AOV and LTV over the CPA. Does that mean that in the medium term, with always increasing advertising costs only the companies that keep adding on new products in order to increase the LTV will be able to survive?

Question (37:24-37:48) | Answer (37:50-39:14)

10. Question: The more products you can sell to your happy customers, the higher your long-term value and the more probable you make up for the initial loss you take from the high CPA. But that also means that if you’re starting out or if presently you’re only selling one product, it will be much more difficult to really get to break even. Do you have to buy yourself into the market, making it up for an investment that you hope to recover when you keep adding on more backhands?

Question (39:15-39:38) | Answer (39:39-47:04)

11. Question: Given different awareness levels of our intended audience, does best practice include creating multiple ads with copy that talks to each level? As in someone may be searching ways to lose weight and okay, so someone may be searching ways to lose weight and another may be searching sit up variations. His program would help them get the results they’re after, but the two conversations would be totally different. With the activity that makes the biggest impact be eight ads for the latter audience, the ones that already believe working on as the answer or the former, the ones who know that they need to lose their beer bellies but don’t know where to start. On one end I see the value of targeting a problem aware audience because you could potentially stand out as the first person to introduce a new and exciting solution. On the other end, I also see value in targeting the solution aware audience because their beliefs are likely closely aligned to your own.

Question (47:11-48:10) | Answer (48:12-57:12)

12. Question: Module zero, in the audience and offer masterclass where we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of defining the right price points and overall packaging the offer? For example, selling an online course and adding coaches and calls to it, having him sell for the coaching, et cetera.

Question (57:25-57:45) | Answer (57:47-1:00:08)

13. Question: Will we go into how to define front end versus back end offers? If so, how do we define a front end offer that delivers awesome value without cannibalizing your back end offer? How to find a sweet spot between too little value and too much.

Question (1:00:09-1:00:14) | Answer (1:00:15-1:04:32)

14. Question: So, this is module one, section two, A, and he’s quoting things that I’ve said as he goes through. So, the quote is “No right way. Would it be fair to add that the mechanism should suit the audience too? For example, he sells an online course for motorcycle riding, so the audience expects to see some motorcycle action, versus having a multi page [inaudible 01:05:07] site based on text.

Question (1:04:33-1:05:10) | Answer (1:05:15-1:07:05)

15. Question: Few things matter. How do you determine what elements are part of the 1%? How do you determine the impacts? Assuming this one will be bringing the answer in the vein of hypothesis to be tested. I’d be interested in knowing what would be the basis for the hypothesis? How do you measure the results of the test?

Question (1:07:29-1:07:44) | Answer (1:07:47-1:20:10)

16. Question: You mentioned in module one not to use you and your in Facebook ads. Well, you may cover this in depth later. I’m running ads now and would love any guidance on the language of how we address our audience. Is this the personal story approach using I or is it using we in some form? I suspect the answer is “it depends” or it’s “both, but I’m curious. Is there any guidance you can give?

Question (1:20:12-1:20:39) | Answer (1:20:39-1:29:47)

17. Question: How do I optimize for sales if I’m running a lead campaign, and a sale might be generated six weeks down the line, or do I need to wait until modules five and six?

Question (1:33:57-1:34:10) | Answer (1:30:00-1:37:54)

18. Question: What is your opinion on creating content for organic posts on Facebook? I seem to spend way too much time creating beautiful, so I’m told, high value content, gets good engagement from my point of view. But when I check the stats, I see that although a good number of folks visit my website and engage with content, very few appeared to opt in to my list and purchase my products.

Question (1:38:07-1:38:28) | Answer (1:38:28-1:42:40)

19. Question: Is there a way to create organic content effectively?

Question (1:42:40-1:42:38) | Answer (1:42:56-1:43:19)

20. Question: How are we going to test sales pages? Do we have a special method to know if the sales page works?

Question (1:43:57-1:44:04) | Answer (1:44:05-1:44:56)

21. Question: What happens if we cannot spend thousands of dollars, and then we just start testing with hundreds?

Question (1:45:05-1:45:10) | Answer (1:45:10-1:52:28)

22. Question: In niche selection, I have a business in the health sector, bricks and mortar, there’s high six figure business annually, down to a fraction right now. Do I do something similar online, such a flooded space?

Question (1:52:29-1:52:42) | Answer (1:52:57-1:53:40)

23. Question: How does the exercise in module two would offer creation change when working with a client. Is that something you’re going to dig deep and the client upsell?

Question (1:53:41-1:53:51) | Answer (1:53:52-1:54:37)

24. Question: As a caveat to that deciding specialization, does it matter? I could be a business coach or expand the product we have online that currently out of space or am I crazy to do something completely new?

Question (1:54:39-1:54:50) | Answer (1:54:51-1:56:51)

25. Question: What’s the sweet spot for a front end offer? You have assets ranging from 7 to 197, where do you start?

Question (1:58:22-1:58:28) | Answer (1:58:30-2:05:12)

26. Question: What if you love an audience, like your values align, but you are unsure if they would ever spend money on you. In other words, what if the income of that audience, they can’t afford you. Do change your audience altogether or do you design a product that they can afford?

Question (2:05:20-2:05:33) | Answer (2:05:34-2:07:33)

27. Question: How would you recommend to sell an initial product if I haven’t created an audience yet?

Question (2:07:43-2:07:47) | Answer (2:07:48-2:07:54)

28. Question: If good economics is just breaking even with paid traffic, getting new customers for free. What happens if I only offer one particular service or product? In my case, I have a school that focuses on preparing students for one particular exam to get a certification. Once they get it, I can’t sell them anything else. In that case, it wouldn’t make sense for me to spend money on traffic if the customer that I acquire doesn’t leave me profit. Or am I missing something?

Question (2:08:05-2:08:34) | Answer (2:08:35-2:11:26)

29. Question: How relevant is a modern statement if 80% of the revenue from customers coming between months, three 18 free commerce? In other markets, for example, non-English speaking markets, national European markets. Where can we find statistics about this?

Question (2:11:28-2:11:46) | Answer (2:11:46-2:14:09)

30. Question: In module zero you talked about CPA cost per acquisition, cost per lead. Are the metrics the same?

Question (2:14:10-2:14:18) | Answer (2:14:18-2:16:20)

31. Question: If a team works for the homework on module one, I have two questions about direction and strategy. What answers should they choose? The execution guys answers, the managers answers, the owners?

Question (2:16:21-2:16:45) | Answer (2:16:46-2:25:18)

31. Question: In our business model to the eCommerce, they harvest important money at the first cell, the front end, and then they my double income client in 10 to 20 years from supplies. Most of the products are of this kind, should we use the eCommerce model or a direct response?

Question (2:25:19-2:25:37) | Answer (2:25:37-2:26:40)

32. Question: Where does YouTube fit in? It seems like it’s more like Facebook interruption model, but I wonder if it uses keywords like Google.

Question (2:27:49-2:27:15) | Answer (2:27:15-2:27:48)

33. Question: Curious about reconciling our synergies, what we personally want to optimize, and business results and what we’re wanting to optimize for the user. As in the result experience of wanting to optimize for my clients is different from my personal goals from my business.

Question (2:27:08-2:28:05) | Answer (2:28:06-2:32:28)

34. Question: How does that apply in the context like dentistry, they help dentists attract consultations for high ticket treatments. So is it possible to optimize for buyers when a purchase is anywhere from six to nine?

Question (2:32:30-2:32:40) | Answer (2:32:41-2:32:28)

35. Question: So is it more cost efficient to keep your attracting traffic on Facebook for the first layer, filtering, pre-sell, preframe for setting up on Facebook pages but then not chat bot, etcetera? Or is it cheaper to direct them away to an external medium?

Question (2:33:38-2:33:51) | Answer (2:33:54-2:37:17)

36. Question: The topic is using brand positioning our ads to differentiate from competitors. In my opinion, Facebook ads are way more effective for that because the chance for long tax reveals and Google ads don’t work. Problem solution. What do you think?

Question (2:37:23-2:37:36) | Answer (2:37:36-2:38:41)

37. Question: The topic is using brand positioning our ads to differentiate from competitors. In my opinion, Facebook ads are way more effective for that because the chance for long tax reveals and Google ads don’t work. Problem solution. What do you think?

Question (2:38:59-2:39:04) | Answer (2:39:04-2:42:34)

38. Question: What tools do you use for tracking Google and Facebook Ads?

Question (2:42:45-2:42:48) | Answer (2:42:48-2:43:03)

39. Question: How do I test and optimize my system?

Question (2:43:03-2:43:05) | Answer (2:43:05-2:48:38)

40. Question: I’m a total greeny. I’m still trying to figure out how to see and know who has seen my pages. What do I use to do that? Google analytics?

Question (2:49:22-2:49:33) | Answer (2:49:33-2:51:09)

41. Question: In light of my experience with the focus group misidentifying a core customer, this customer’s a young athlete, 10 to 22 years old, but the buyer is the parent. My stories are focused on player growth, emotional and physical and not parent selection. Is there a better way to draw them into their sphere? Are those two separate or intertwined?

Question (2:51:15-2:51:37) | Answer (2:51:37-2:53:49)

42. Question: I think it would be great to elaborate more on the LTV if you are mainly doing one, just one signature product course versus not adding too many new other products courses.

Question (2:56:49-2:57:10) | Answer (2:57:15-2:58:57)

43. Question: When selling products, which are for family use, does it make any sense to try and guess who from the family is a decision maker?

Question (2:59:04-2:59:13) | Answer (2:59:13-3:01:14)

44. Question: Latin America is a market with a mentality of make-money-now. I want to build a business focus on customers with a different mindset or long term business. My biggest problem is tracking those customers with ads. What points should I improve in my campaign to generate higher quality leads?

Question (3:02:17-3:02:32) | Answer (3:02:18-3:05:24)

Transcript

Shawn (00:00:03):
Welcome everybody. I appreciate seeing where everybody’s coming from. It looks like we have so far, 53 or so participants. We scheduled this for a couple of hours, we may go over. The format is going to be people who sent questions first will have priority and I have, I think it’s about seven pages of questions. It’s not seven pages of individual questions, there’s some background. I don’t want to get the names horribly wrong so for the most part I’m not going to share the person who asked the question, you’ll know your question when you’re listening to it. Some of these are people who are not going to be able to be on the call and others just sort of thought out loud, put together a question. Just one caveat about this, a lot of people ask questions for three, four, five, six weeks down the road, I’m not going to answer questions about that. I might throw the question out there and if there’s something that now we need to think about then I’ll answer it. But some of you, based on your emails, are trying to write Facebook ad copy now and I cannot stress enough that you should stop doing that. You’re going to compromise what you should be learning now by trying to imagine what you’re going to learn five or six weeks from now. When I train students and take window, one of the things that I tell them all the time is, “Do not try to get through the drill, be in the drill, be in the training.” So I do understand that many of you are working on your own businesses and you’re trying to project ahead and I get that, Or you’re working with clients, I absolutely get that. But if you continue to have your eyes on the horizon at the expense of what we’re talking about now, when we actually do get to that point on the horizon, it’s just not going to be nearly as valuable. So please do the work in the order that we’re doing it. Please spend time in the things that we’re doing now because everything else will make a lot more sense and it will be a lot more valuable to you when we get to that point. So having said that, I may read a question as we go and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to answer that later.” Or I may violate everything I just said and just answer the questions because who knows.

Shawn (00:02:17):
I’m going to start with a question from Mike. And this may turn into a hot seat, so Mike, if you’re on the calls, let André know you’re here and we can continue. So here’s the background from Mike. Just now I have an opportunity to build my coaching practice. My initial offerings are various reports that help you learn things like behavioral styles, communication styles, work styles, and other styles depending on the reports. That and deciding on how I want the coaching pipeline to work. If I want to do a Mastermind with John Maxwell’s materials, that’s an expert in that space, or some other thing that may be more valuable to my clients. My question for you is this, “How much of the backend needs to be developed before we start marketing to our potential clients? I have almost too many options right now and I’m trying to figure out what is the best way to go. Do I need to decide now or can I gather information from clients and adapt as I go?”

Shawn (00:03:11):
You absolutely do not have to have a backend built before you start paid traffic. The only thing that you really need is to have an idea, and when we get into the testing phase we can talk about how you can even test an idea, but if you’re trying to monetize traffic in the short term, and when I say monetize, just meaning make your money back, or make some portion of your money back. Then having something on the front end that you’re selling, is ideal. Or if you’re just doing lead gen, then you just need to have a budget. You just need to be able to say, “I’ll pick a number.” And these numbers are not meaningful, they’re just example numbers. Mike could be in a situation where he has these reports, he wants to give them away or sell them depending on what it is, and he wants to know which ones resonate most with his audience and he is motivated to spend $500 to get whatever, 7,500, 200 people into some sort of audience, probably by email, to have that conversation with them. One-on-one and give them the, let’s say it’s three reports and they select a report and then he’s communicated with them by email and asking them questions. What are you looking for? What are you interested in? What’s the biggest problem you’re trying to solve? Like really engaging with whoever signs up to determine, first of all, how receptive are they? If you have a hundred people who have requested a report and two of them reply to your emails, it’s not a very responsive audience. That’s a very important thing to know.

Shawn (00:04:40):
If you have a hundred people in an audience, like in you send them emails, personal emails, asking them what they were looking for, and you get 60 responses, in every one of their responses it’s clear they have a very pressing need. Well that’s a very different piece of information. So the overall framework of front end and back end is, it’s a longer term framework, but we need to know it now primarily so that we understand that the front end of a business in general is not where the money is made. That’s not always true. If you are selling a high cost offer, whatever that is, $2,000 program, $18,000 program and you have no front end, that’s fine. You just have a different metric which is real ads, return on ad spend. It’s just a different metric to use, but you still need to understand the concepts and that’s really why I spent so much time on this distinctions between CPA, AOV and LTV. Even if you don’t actually use any of those numbers, you absolutely have to understand what those numbers would mean conceptually, that you are paying to acquire a customer and in some period of time you want to make as much of that money back as possible in a short period of time so that you don’t run out of money acquiring customers. And then the actual money, the profit, is made usually after that first sale, but not always. Sometimes on that first sale. So long answer to a short question.

Shawn (00:06:15):
Mike’s going to jump on here I think, to follow up with this, but the main question here is how much of the backend do you have to have finished? And you don’t, but don’t use that as permission to just go do whatever on the front end having no idea how you’re going to monetize it later. I would be doing a terrible disservice to you if I said don’t even think about it. You don’t have to have it complete, but you do have to have an idea of how you’re going to monetize the attention that you’re buying or you need very deep pockets that you can just buy attention all day long and who cares? And if that’s you, awesome. I just don’t think that’s most people. All right, André, you want to let Mike jump on here and ask any follow up ?

André (00:06:57):
Yeah, so I’m going to allow Mark to get on. Just as a rule of thumb for anybody that has a question either related to something that Shawn’s saying or something that hasn’t been yet spoken about, use the Q&A button. Don’t use the chat window, so we can then organize it and file it on the send. Okay Mark, I’m going to allow you to talk. There we go. Can you hear us?

Mike Traywick (00:07:27):
Hello André, hello Shawn. Thank you for answering my question. You were pretty thorough in answering my question and really it gives me hope because I am kind of confused. Not confused but I don’t know exactly how to take it after I get people into my coaching lane. Just for a little background. I can do it with businesses, but I’m a teacher, I’m a former teacher and I’d like to focus on teachers. What is the best way … I guess you answered that too with the email question, so would you just dive in after you get people to buy the report or however I do it? Dive in and just interact and look for where the greatest value is to serve the client base?

Shawn (00:08:23):
It doesn’t have to be email, and none of this has to be digital incidentally. If you can find an audience aggregated somewhere, you could do it some other way. So it’s not the mechanics as much as it’s the concepts. So what you’re really trying to do, what we’re all really trying to do, if we haven’t made the system already, so if we don’t have a finely tuned conversion engine where we know kind of the numbers and we have a front end to acquire customers and a backend to monetize those customers over time. And that’s a lot of us. If we don’t have that, then the biggest danger that we face is that we go down a road and we spend a lot of our time and our attention and our money and we find out that’s the wrong road. So what we’re really trying to do here is to put the, I don’t want to say the least amount of time and the least amount of money, because that suggests that we’re not really committing, but we want to put an appropriate amount of time in an appropriate amount of ad spend to answer a specific question. And that question might be broad. Like is there really a market here? And then the way that you get that information, part of it’s science. And there’s a myth about how scientific all of this really is, that there’s so many leaks and tracking and there’s so many just broad leaks and as much as we want this to be decimal place accuracy, it’s okay to have anecdotal information, especially at first.

Shawn (00:09:53):
Because what you’re really doing is you’re saying, “I think …” I being you, “… that these three reports have the highest value to this particular audience because I think this is the need that it addresses.” But the moment you have the ability to test that hypothesis, like you have 10, 12, 15 people who have received those reports, that’s when you want to start those conversations. And what you’re really trying to figure out is where you at all right in your assessment. You might have thought that the biggest issue that they’re struggling is X, and then you get on the phone with them and you realize that’s not the issue they’re struggling with at all, it’s Y. And then that allows you to course correct and that back and forth and back and forth is what builds such a solid understanding of your audience, which is better for your audience, which is in turn better for you. So how you do that, email’s one way. A popular way is through surveys. I don’t love surveys, I don’t know what it is about them. I’ve worked with a lot of clients who’ve used them. I don’t know, it’s fascinating to me, but the survey to me is not as immediate as having somebody reply to an email or say, “Yeah, I’d love to do a 15 minute Skype call with you.” And people will. If you can do that, make that offer but have those conversations. It’s sort of this idea of getting outside the building and really talking to customers while the building might be your home office, whatever, but get outside and ask people and really engage with them and listen. That’s the other thing. You’re not looking for evidence to confirm.

Shawn (00:11:34):
And this is a probably the biggest mistake I’ve seen happen is somebody has an idea, they solicit feedback and what they mean by soliciting feedback is they’re looking for confirmation that their original idea was right. And as soon as they have enough of that confirmation, they check the box and they move forward with that idea. Don’t do that. Ask questions and then listen to what people have to say. And then when you begin the second round, whatever that is, a week later, two weeks later, the language of your advertising will change, the language of all of your messaging will change. Maybe slightly, but it will change for the better because now it’s informed by what your audience has told you, really matters to them. Does that make sense?

Mike Traywick (00:12:18):
Yeah, that’s awesome, thank you. That’s my biggest fear, I have this abstract idea, but what is the reality? And obviously I’ve talked to people about this, for whatever reason, I didn’t really think about that in a general, faceless … The people I know who I have put through this process already, I can solicit their advice but I didn’t think about doing the same exact thing with the faceless mob, so to speak, or audience I should say maybe.

Shawn (00:12:48):
The other thing you can ask too, one of my favorite questions is, “How much money have you spent trying to solve this problem already?” And if the answer is none, that’s a very strong signal. Or if the answer is, “I wouldn’t even dare count.” Well that’s a fairly strong signal too. Because there are audiences out there that are really interested and will have a lot of dialogue with you. And then when you ask, “How much money have you spent on this already?” And they’re like, “Oh, none. I don’t have money to spend on this, but it sure is a big problem.” Well, that’s a really good piece of information to have. And there are some audiences that just don’t spend money on things for whatever, even though they have serious issues, everything else looks like it would indicate that they would be receptive. They just, for whatever reason, don’t spend money on it. So that’s a very important question to ask.

Shawn (00:13:48):
If you’re selling on the front end in, $47 report, $97 report, 197, whatever it is, well you get some of that information already, you’re talking to people who’ve raised their hand and purchased. And that’s a different dataset. It’s a more valuable dataset, it’s just harder. Initially the question becomes, how much data do you want to work with and how much money can you spend to get that data versus how much do you need to get back as quickly as possible? Because you need to offset those costs. Lots of factors go into this, but is that directionally right for your thinking?

Mike Traywick (00:14:24):
Yeah, that’s great. I appreciate it.

Shawn (00:14:27):
Excellent. Keep the questions coming, Mike. Thank you. And thank you for your service, by the way, Mike.

Shawn (00:14:35):
All right, let’s jump to the next question. So this is actually a really fascinating question. The person who submitted this question wants eventually to have a business that’s generating $5,000 a month after taxes and he currently has a $47 product. That’s the only product, it’s a front end product, it’s not really a direct response model, it’s much more of an eCommerce model because he just wants to sell this $47 product to get to that $5,000 a month after taxes, and he wants to know how to estimate his traffic cost to do that. This is not my favorite answer. My second least favorite answer is, “It depends.” My first least favorite answer is, “It’s impossible to know.” This is an impossible to know question. Or I’m sorry, it’s impossible to estimate in advance because we don’t know how well the offer converts. We don’t know the audience, we don’t know how well the offer will convert to the audience. We have none of that information. We don’t know what it costs to interact with that audience or those audiences. So, I mentioned this question not to give a non answer, but I mentioned this question because it’s a really important question that we need to understand. I’ve seen these charts and infographics and other things that say like, “The average cost of a lead on Facebook is X.” They’re absolutely meaningless. If one person’s paying $100 a lead and the other person’s paying a dollar lead, the average cost per lead is 50. Neither one of those people are paying $50 for a lead. And it doesn’t separate audiences, it’s meaningless. So the only way to answer this question is, in my opinion, is to identify an audience that should be most receptive to the offer. This person has to have specified who he believe his audience is, and then to allocate some amount of money, 200 or 300, 150, whatever it is, allocate that money and run a test to see if that audience buys that product and at what rate. And that’s just an initial data point and lots of things can happen. You can say, “I want to spend $100 to see if this offer, the way I’ve presented it, will convert to this audience.” And you may spend $100 and get zero sales. Now is it the audience or the offer? In that case, we don’t know. We have to dig a little bit deeper and look at sort of the people go from the ad landing page and then they didn’t convert. We have to deconstruct why.

Shawn (00:17:23):
Or you might spend $100 and you might make 300 in sales. Well that’s a different piece of data. In that case, do more. It’s unfortunate, but when we’re running paid traffic, this is the reality and the numbers change over time consistently and they’re very different per platform and very different per audience. When we get into ad words this week, next two weeks, we’ll see that we calculate this with the keyword ‘phrase level’. So, I know that’s not the answer, I suspect that’s not the answer everybody wants to hear but what’s also critical in this example is CPA, AOV and LTV are not the way to think about a business like this. This would actually be ROAS return on ad spend. When you sell a single product and you want to make your profit on that product, then return on ad spend is a better metric. It’s R-O-A-S, return on ad spend, it’s pronounced ROAZ. That is a better metric because you’re saying I am spending X amount of dollars and in return I’m getting X amount of dollars. And some ratio, usually north of four to one, somewhere between four and eight to one, depending on your industry, those are broad targets for ROAS. So if you spend $5 you would want to get $20 plus. And how you figure that out is to go out and do the work and to see what result you get and then continually to iterate towards success. That’s just the reality of it.

Shawn (00:18:54):
Next question. This is about LBC and the traffic engine. So LBC is based on a low cost content for this particular person, [inaudible 00:19:09] low cost continuity program. Like the questions, what about a backend? How does that factor in? Again, back end, you do not have to have this. This was a comment with the question with Mike. You do not have to have that in place to start. You can use LBC with traffic engine and you can have a very low cost initial offer, very low cost continuity. You’re just learning the economics, and that’s what’s so critical about these early phases is we have to internalize a conceptual understanding of the economics. That we need to know that we’ve put a dollar out onto a traffic platform and we need to know how much comes back from that investment, and when does it come back. And maybe what you learned with LBC is that you put $7 out into the world and it brings back $7 over the first 30 days. Well, excellent. You’ve just made a free customer generating machine. That’s amazing. Free customers, that’s the gold standard. So pat yourself on the back. You may put $7 out and you may get $14 in return, and that’s staggeringly good. Or you might put $7 out and make $3 back. But if the same idea underlies all of this is that when we’re spending money for paid traffic, we have to understand the economics of it.

Shawn (00:20:38):
Or, we’re essentially either wasting money because we’re not looking closely enough or we’re making assumptions that somehow that money magically will return. And it does. To be in some examples, brand advertising, that’s the fundamental concept of brand advertising, that you’re building awareness by spending money and that that awareness comes back. That just doesn’t work at the level that we’re talking about. That works for Nike, works for Porsche. It doesn’t work so well for a smaller business. So to learn those economics, that’s the short term. And you can learn that with any methodology. If you’ve invested in LBC and you’re doing that work, use that. That will give you the understanding that you need. And once you have that understanding, then you actually have the power. This is a teach to fish program, not a, I’ve done the fishing for you and just do this and fill in the blanks. You are going to learn how to fish in this program well beyond whatever example you’re using when you go through it the first time. That’s the whole point, this is skill transfer. It is the ability to take what you’re learning and apply it to something and then use that something to learn how to apply it broadly in whatever other somethings that you want to apply it to. Whether it’s expanding what you’re currently doing or working with clients in doing that, or starting a new venture and doing that. Whatever it is, you are learning how to do the work and how to think about doing the work in a way that’s incredibly efficient and effective, that you’re not paying attention to the 99% of what doesn’t matter. You’re looking at the 1% or 5% whatever it is that really drives the big results and focusing on that. And that’s how this entire program is framed.

Shawn (00:22:22):
There’s a second question here too. So the question was, this is sort of restating something I said. You said that Google’s users think in terms of ‘what is?’, ‘how do I?’, ‘what’s the best way to?’. Could you please be explicit about what questions to keep in mind when writing copy for Facebook? What are the questions in minds of Facebook users when they’re looking for entertainment or as I said, information on education? This is a really great question. I’m so glad you asked this because it’s critical to understand that Google’s users are thinking in terms of questions. Facebook users are not. Don’t try to figure out the questions Facebook users are asking because they’re not asking questions. They’re not searching for something. They are stumbling on what has showed up in their news feed, which is heavily influenced by what they’re already interested in, but there is no question. The question might be, “Oh, what’s about to show up in my slot machine of a newsfeed.” But they’re not asking questions. You are interrupting them. Your advertisement on Facebook is showing up in their personal social space along with pictures of their friends’ kids, pictures of their kids funny cat videos, you name it. That’s what your ad, that’s the context for your ad. They’re not looking for it.

Shawn (00:23:42):
So, I can’t overstate how critical this distinction is. This is passive potential interest in Facebook. Google is active intent. We don’t browse Google. We don’t go, “Hey, what’s new on Google today?” It’s not how it works. But it’s, if you’re waiting in line to check out at the grocery store and you pull out your phone and you randomly spin through your news feed, that’s a very different experience and you’re not going in thinking, “Oh, I really hope I find a video today about X.” Or, “I really hope I learned about what … ” It’s not that at all. So just the mindset has to change dramatically. We’ll talk about that a lot when we get into Facebook. I will start talking about it this week in module three when we’re sort of half orienting our minds out of how AdWorks works. Next question. Another several questions. This person has run an agency for 20 years, just to frame the concepts. So first thing he says is, “What we offer is in three areas, user experience and digital transformation, website development and support, digital marketing and SEO. My thoughts are that I will need to pick one area to concentrate on as the offer is quite different.” That’s not necessarily true. Maybe, let’s think about this for a second. So, if you have three proven offers, meaning you’ve sold user experience and digital transformation, website development and support and digital marketing and SEO, then you have proven offers. You’ve made money selling them and you’ve been in business for 20 years, so I imagine those were pretty well-proven offers. So you could roll out one offer at a time. And I’m guessing it’s a different audience for each. If it’s the exact same audience, that’s a little more interesting because you might want to go one level higher and have some way to assess which of those places is the best place to start.

Shawn (00:25:42):
But the thing to keep in mind, the reason I really like this question for everybody’s benefit is, we know that we have multiple offers. The customer, the prospect seeing into our world only sees what we’ve shown them. So somebody could be searching in Australia for user experience, X, Y, Z, whatever the search terms would be, and that person would see your offer specific to that need, but might not know initially that you also do website development support and digital marketing, and that’s fine. They don’t need to know that. It’s not like you’re hiding it from them, it’s just not relevant to them at that time. Now, maybe later in your sales cycle, that would be beneficial for them to know, but initially we are trying to match the most relevant audience to the most relevant offer. So, the perfect audience to the perfect offer as closely as we possibly can and then build out from there. And you can do that with three offers simultaneous if you have the budget and budget of time, energy and dollars to support that. Or if you think one of your offers is a home run, it just does better than the others, or she’d get more joy for one offer, whatever it is, you could start with one or start with all three or start with two, or you can also put all three out to figure out which one, if it’s the same audience, which one resonates most.

Shawn (00:27:13):
Lots of ways to do this, but don’t feel like you have to pick one offer and just focus on that, unless it takes away from your ability to focus on it. Sometimes it’s easier to do the same thing across three or four examples or two or three examples and other times just because of the overhead of creation, it’s harder. So stack the deck in your favor, park on a downhill slope, pick one, pick two, pick three and I would suggest picking the one that converts the best because that’ll give you the strongest signal.

Shawn (00:27:43):
Second question, same person. “My offer is generally a higher ticket price item. I do have lower cost items like audits, marketing plans, et cetera. However, ultimately we want to build a customer’s website and then have them transition through the other offers.” He says, “I have a value ladder-ish.” I love that. “I’m not really sure what my question is here other than the higher ticket price and quantifying whether my legion tactics are working has been quite challenging or downright annoying. Preach brother, preach.” So the first thing I’d recommend doing is map a typical customer journey or journeys. Just look back on the last five years, three years, like how does somebody find you? If it’s 100% word of mouth, just do that. Just be honest and upfront with yourself and just how do I get customers? 99% of my business is through word of mouth. The irony is not lost [inaudible 00:28:39] that my agency business, 100% of my consulting business is word of mouth. If I were to do a customer journey, it’s a pretty weird journey. It’s kind of like, invest 25 years in your career and meet enough people who do the work over two and a half decades, meet other people who have been doing the work for a similar amount of time, develop long-term relationships based on value and then profit. It’s kind of an interesting business model that I don’t necessarily recommend to everybody, but that’s my actual customer journey. If I look back on customers I have, that’s the reality.

Shawn (00:29:14):
So what I would recommend that you do with this exercise is map your typical customer journeys. Meaning, how did they hear about you? After they heard about you what happened next? Did they call or did they email, did they read a blog post? Whatever it is, what you’re looking for are the inflection points. When did they first hear about you? When did they first interact with you? What was the nature of that interaction? What additional interactions did it lead to? And then the big one is, what did they first purchase? And after that purchase, what did they purchase next? How did they purchase that next thing? Like what made them aware of it? You just need an understanding of it. This isn’t decimal place accuracy, can do it with a crayon on a piece of paper, and if it’s the exact same journey, excellent. My guess is it’s not. My guess is you have two or three different journeys and what you need to ask yourself is, within these different journeys what makes them different? Because you’ll see it from your perspective to the offer, but what is it about the audience? What distinguishing characteristics of the audience make this customer journey different than this customer journey? Because ultimately that allows us to have to find that particular audience and show them the right first thing, second thing, third thing. What you’re trying to do with this is to now work backwards to a starting point that you can use paid traffic to do the first part of that engagement. So, if most people hear about you through word-of-mouth and you have to reverse engineer word-of-mouth. I had a larger market, so you need to have some way to make that first contact that’s the equivalent of word-of-mouth and then take them to the next thing that somebody who hears about you through word-of-mouth usually does next, or next, or whatever is after that. So you just need to map that first part and then know that becomes your traffic engine, that initial, whatever part of that journey is, happens with paid traffic and then everything else happens either by email or through indirect one-on-one consultation or with a sales team or whatever it is, however your process works for that.

Shawn (00:31:26):
All right, let’s move on. There’s a lot of, this is like 10 questions in one email. “My first question is about systems theory. When I read about it in André’s work it intuitively made a lot of sense. At the same time it sounds like using mostly your gut feeling to know how to optimize your system. I hardly get enough traffic to run a statistically relevant split test to decide on a headline. If I wanted to test the impact of one element on the entire system, I would need an incredible amount of traffic running through the system. Yes, sure, you use principle number …

Shawn (00:32:00):
Running through the system. Yes, sure. You use principle number five, focus on the longterm happiness of your customer and a lot of decisions are being taken care of, but I could guess that you still would want to know what sales page converts better. You would want to eliminate any pushy, sleazy elements from the sales page that artificially increased sales, but if you have two equally honest sales page pages, wouldn’t you want to test which one performs better? Okay, so there’s a lot there. Great. I appreciate these questions. These are great questions.

Shawn (00:32:34):
Gut feeling is not how to optimize systems. Just to be very, very clear. In how I described that I suggested that, I apologize because that is not at all on how to optimize a system. The gut feeling which what I think where the miscommunication happened is that’s when you decide what you’re optimizing the system for. Right? What is your goal as a business owner or as a creative professional or as a service provider, what are you optimizing the system for? It could be maximum money, that’s a very common one. Like, “How do I get this thing that I’m building to make me the maximum amount of money possible?” That’s a way to optimize. Sometimes it’s quality of life. Like you know, “I haven’t made a ton of money but I only want to work with people I really like,” or whatever it is.

Shawn (00:33:25):
Sometimes it’s some combination where it’s, “I need to make a certain amount of money to feel valued, but anything over a certain amount doesn’t really add as much utility. So there’s a balance. I want a certain amount of money and a certain quality of life.” That’s the gut feeling part. When I say gut feeling it’s really, I can’t answer that question for you because I have no idea what your criteria is for a successful business and I shouldn’t. There is no defining answer to that other than your answer, the question… In order to know if our business system is producing the outcomes we’ve identified as being important, we need to know what those outcomes are and in order to know where the constraint is in that, we need to know what we’re optimizing for. That’s really where gut feeling comes up.

Shawn (00:34:23):
After that, systemic optimization is the system I’ve produced creating that result and if it’s not, why do I think it’s not? If I look at it holistically, not why aren’t the parts, because that’s sort of a critical element of systems theory. The parts don’t produce the results. They’re the results of the system emerged from the interaction of the parts. So you have sort of running down to the level of the sales page versus this sales page. Maybe that’s the solution, but my guess is maybe higher. It might be higher level or messaging or something like that. Okay. Second question. This is about Facebook, so I’m going to go through this very quickly. A good point to rely on the big data of Facebook, which means that going for a sales conversion is completely different than asking Facebook for leads, but initially when you don’t have enough buyers on your Facebook pixels, don’t you have to first optimize for leads?

Shawn (00:35:23):
We’re going to talk about this in depth when we get to the Facebook section. This has been asked different ways by different people and comments and other things, so I’m going to address this very quickly. There are certainly situations where, because of the volume of traffic that we’re running, we have to optimize for something other than the end goal that we want. It could be because of timing, like it takes 30 days before we make a sale, the way our system is designed and we can optimize for that. That’s completely possible, or you don’t have enough data and you have to optimize for something else. All of that is true. It’s an issue we all deal with, but what’s critically important to understand is that the way we think about optimizing for leads is different than the way Facebook thinks about optimizing for leads.

Shawn (00:36:14):
We see the relationship between opt in and purchase because that’s how we view our business. We see that in order to make a purchase, somebody has to have opted in. Therefore, there is a causal relationship between purchase and lead and Facebook looks at the likelihood or the proclivity to opt in to become a lead as a discreet piece of information that has no causal relationship to becoming a customer. When you tell Facebook that you are optimizing for leads, it will go find the people who opt in for things. Now is there a relationship between the opt in and eventual purchase in your system? There is. In Facebook’s perspective, there isn’t and they are not explicit about telling you that. So it seems like we’re just doing the next best thing, but in reality we’re approximating a next best thing and you can get really good at optimizing for leads and not generate a single customer.

Shawn (00:37:19):
So it’s just an awareness at this point. Okay. Third question. Not really a question though, rather a takeaway. The challenge is to keep AOV and LTV over the CPA. I love that you’re using these terms by the way, this is great, thank you. That means that in the medium term, we’re always increasing advertising costs. Only the companies that keep adding on new products order to increase the LTV will be able to survive. The more products you can sell to your happy customer, well it’s experts address this first. That’s not true. So always increasing, I’m sorry. With always increasing advertising costs, only the companies that keep adding on new products order to increase the LTV will be able to survive. That’s not true, because you can redo CPA, especially as CPA gets really off the charts expensive, you can reduce CPA. It’s just there’s a floor to it.

Shawn (00:38:15):
I guess the bigger thing is here, I don’t want you to have that as a takeaway, that you always have to add new products. It’s not true. So LTV, one of the things that we talked about early on in the manifesto is that there’s four times more opportunity after 90 days in revenue opportunities. So right there, we know the economics of an initial offer. If you’re using a lead gen on the front end then over two years you’re going to get four times. If you do it right and you’re not a jerk and you interact with your audience positively, you’re going to get a significant return over the next two years anyway, based in compared to people who are having a more short term focus. So that’s part of it.

Shawn (00:38:59):
LTV calculation. I don’t want you to think about that this is an offer that the paid traffic necessitates that you’re just cranking out offer after offer, product after product, but that’s not the outcome that I want you to think about. So continuing this, the more products you can sell to your happy customers, the higher your longterm value and the more probable you make up for the initial loss you take from the high CPA. But that also means that if you’re starting out or if presently you’re only selling one product, it will be much more difficult to really get to break even. It’s almost like you have to buy yourself into the market, making it up for an investment that you hope to recover when you keep adding on more backhands, right? No. No, no, no. No, I have seen and I’ve used these examples in emails and comments and other places and I’ll share a couple of them now. I’ll share two.

Shawn (00:39:51):
So I know someone who spent $700 on Facebook. He generated from that $700 approximately 400 email leads. Of those 400 email leads, he… Wonderful human being, really used email to interact with this audience to really understand their needs. He realized the best way to communicate with that audience was not through email, it was with a Facebook group. So he then opened up a Facebook group where he gives lots of content, close fans. It’s a private Facebook group, they have to join and interacts with clients in that Facebook group. So here’s the initial economics. $700 gets 400. I think it’s 421 people on an email list, that in turn there were 200, 250 or so people on in a Facebook group. Initially he interacted with that Facebook group over, I think it was two or three months, just leading with value. Really understood what the audience wanted, put together an offer based on those needs and generated $96,000 in revenue from a $997 a month coaching program.

Shawn (00:41:01):
So I’m not suggesting that tomorrow you’re going to spend $700 and figure out a way to make $96,000 but there’s a very valuable lesson in that. What was his cost to acquire a customer? Well, initially he had the money to invest. He put $700 into it. So with no understanding of what was going to happen, he just got 400 people. He did a traditional lead magnet. I mean this was just a test and he got these people and interacted with them and it took a while, but then realized there was incredible value there. So there are lots of ways to come at this once you understand how the pieces fit together. Now in that same situation, if he had asked me on the front end, “What do I do?” I would not say just keep running that and continue to spend. I don’t know if it took him like six weeks or so to spend the $700.

Shawn (00:42:04):
I would not say, “Well just keep spending $125 a week and let’s see what happens.” The way he did it was perfect. He spent a certain amount of money and he got an audience and then he interacted with that audience and then he made an offer that that audience had already told them that they wanted through, because he was leading with value. So it’s a different way to approach it and I suspect in the future now, I think he has since done this. Now he knows that the economics of that machine a little bit better, so now he can go back and say, “Okay, let me turn on this machine that generates email leads, which I then turn into Facebook group members, which I then turn into coaching program members.” Because he has proved the efficacy of that model through that initial test.

Shawn (00:42:55):
So that’s a critical distinction. Don’t get wound up and I may go back and make some edits to the initial copies. I don’t want you to feel like you have to have… I mean he has a back end there and no front end, right? It’s quite a backend and I know any of us on this call, if he said, “Hey, would you be willing to trade $700 for $96,000?” I think we’re all going to answer yes. Another example that I’ve seen, I was not involved with this. It’s a unicorn example that I use as one of the things that I’ve deconstructed because it was so profound, but it was somebody who and I’m not entirely sure about the numbers, I have two numbers in my notes. Either one of them is staggeringly impressive so I’ll share both of them.

Shawn (00:43:36):
This was somebody who knew nothing about Facebook at all, was sort of not well known but well known to a few in a particular space and put together sort of the Magnum Opus of, I believe it was her career to sort of say, “I’m going to take people through this training, here’s what it’s going to be. I know this is what you need.” The ads were clunky. It violated every rule of what should work and I think that person spent $400 or so, $450 and the two numbers, I remember a $42,000 or $76,000 in revenue from it. Very small ad spend and I’ve seen that happen a lot. When I say a lot, 10 12, 15 times and I think it’s because and I’ve talked about this before, I think it’s because a person so close to the market, speaks the language of the market and knows the felt needs so closely that the way they express it is just so powerful.

Shawn (00:44:47):
But I’ve seen this same phenomenon and it’s tough for me as an agency owner and it’s one of these other reasons I do less agency work and more consulting and more sort of teaching work is because it’s hard as an agency to come in and compete with that. And what often happens and I’ve seen this happen several times and I have been in the unfortunate position of being the person who was responsible for this sometimes, where an owner or if the person closes to the work learned some way to do it and they went out and they did something that was incredibly successful initially. They spent two or $3,000 and they had $100,000 launch and then they want to quote unquote, “Do it right” and they hire an agency and then everything changes and then they spend 40 50 $60,000 and they have $150,000 launch.

Shawn (00:45:42):
Right. What is that, right? Is it because I’m awful at what I do? I hope not, but I’ve seen that phenomenon enough where you go, “Does that mean every small business owner needs to do their own thing.” No, but there’s something about being really close to like the needs of the audience. I think that’s the big lever and the copy doesn’t sound like copy, it sounds like a human being talking. This is what we’re going to do when we get into writing. Facebook copy in particular, we’re going to talk about this a lot because I have spent a long time trying to reverse engineer the unicorns that I’ve seen and I have a pretty good idea what’s driving their success. So this is all really around this idea of, don’t feel like just because I’ve given you a set of metrics and some examples that you’re going to have that same example.

Shawn (00:46:34):
I work in some of the most difficult competitive markets imaginable, so there are often razor thin distinctions here. You might be in a market where you spend a dollar and you make $15 on the front end and if that’s you, that is amazing. I just want to make sure that everything that I’m talking about in this course applies to that situation and the more likely situation where you’re going to find yourself in a competitive environment. So don’t get hung up on the detail and sort of keep this conceptual. Sorry. Of all right. Next question. This one might’ve been… Nope, this wasn’t that long. Okay. Given different awareness levels of our intended audience, does best practice include creating multiple ads with copy that talks to each level? I want to be cautious here. Is now we’re jumping ahead to writing ads and we should not be writing ads right now. Continuing.

Shawn (00:47:29):
As in someone may be searching ways to lose weight and okay, so someone may be searching ways to lose weight and another may be searching sit up variations. His program would help them get the results they’re after, but the two conversations would be totally different. With the activity that makes the biggest impact be eight ads for the latter audience, the ones that already believe working on as the answer or the former, the ones who know that they need to lose their beer bellies but don’t know where to start. On one end I see the value of targeting a problem aware audience because you could potentially stand out as the first person to introduce a new and exciting solution. On the other end, I also see value in targeting the solution aware audience because their beliefs are likely closely aligned to your own. The initial answer here is both, right?

Shawn (00:48:15):
Do both but do them separately because you’re speaking to the underlying principles. We want to meet every single prospect where they are. Solution aware versus problem aware if the overall awareness scale is unaware, right? They have no idea there’s even a problem or a potential solution to a problem they’re not even aware of. There’s problem aware which is, “I can’t see my toes anymore but I don’t know what to do about it.” And then there’s solution aware which is, “I can’t see my toes anymore and I sort of look through a lot of options available to me and I think exercise is the best one and here’s an option around exercise.” Those are very different conversations. What I would recommend is, you’re not going to know until you know. Which means you’re not going to know the answer to these questions until you have a well structured experiment to answer those questions I think really the only way to do this is through search. You might be able to sort of approximate it. Actually let me talk out loud for a second.

Shawn (00:49:28):
A few ways to do this. One, search is an easy way to find problem aware versus solution aware because they use that in their language and in general you’ll find that the solution aware people are more likely to convert and depending on the economics of the cost of the click, are usually more likely to be ROI positive. Usually. It’s maybe not true for you. Facebook, I think it would be harder to find these people on Facebook. So I might do one of two things and when I say harder to find, I mean harder to distinguish because they’re not looking and I don’t know what factors that would show up in somebody’s interest that would indicate that they’re problem versus solution aware. So on Facebook, here’s what I think I would do and then I’ll tell you what I might also do. What I think I might do is have two different ads speaking to the two different audiences.

Shawn (00:50:26):
One would be speaking to the people who can’t see their toes, realized they packed on some pounds. Know there’s a problem. Don’t even know where to start and then I would approach them from that point and sort of take them through the big levers they could pull to change that situation and I would eventually lead them to my solution and that would take a little bit longer. The solution aware people, I would have a different conversation with. I would sort of acknowledge right up front. You might even say, ” You have this issue and you know this is really the best way to deal with it and let’s talk about it from there,” and sort of go forward from there. That’s initially what might my gut tells me I would do because I would want to know which one of those messages resonated the most with people or is there value in having both of those messages out in the same audience simultaneously because I can’t really distinguish who is solution aware and who is problem aware on Facebook.

Shawn (00:51:34):
I also think I might put all of that into a single ad and take them through the entire journey and I might write the ads so it does both and I would probably test that ad against the other two individually because I would want to know if I could do it all in one ad. Maybe. I don’t know if there’s huge value in that I’m just… Again, a lot of what I’m going to do with you on these Q and A calls is just think out loud so you see how I think and more importantly, that you realize that what you see… It’s funny, what you see with a module that’s written is very precise because of the precision of language and how important that precision is to me. I also want you to be very clear that I don’t sit down and write those modules, start to finish, the way you read them. It is much more of a dialogue that I worked through over and over and over again until I get there.

Shawn (00:52:36):
So the Q and A calls are opportunities for you to sort of hear that crazy dialogue I have with myself and how I do think out loud about these things. There is no right answer, right? There is directionally right answers or probabilistically more likely answers. But the question that I would really have in your scenario to get back to your fundamental question is you have to treat them differently to test to get an answer. So write an ad that’s specific to problem aware. Write an ad that’s specific to solution aware, write another ad that combines both. It’s longer and sort of takes them on a journey and then where ever you have met them in the ad, where do you take them? Next has to be the next logical step in that.

Shawn (00:53:21):
So if somebody is problem aware, you can’t sort of, “Oh okay, here’s your problem, here’s the solution, here’s the sales page for the solution.” Then if somebody is solution aware it’s, “Here’s your solution. Go click here and buy it.” You need to meet the problem aware people. It’s a longer journey. You’re educating before you’re selling much longer. You’re still educating before you’re selling with problem aware, but the education is around the solution versus also explaining that there’s lots of different options for solutions and this is the one that’s the best in your opinion. All right. Excuse me for one second when I take a drink here.

André (00:53:58):
And while you’re taking a drink, I’ve also got a-

Shawn (00:54:00):
Oh thank God, André.

André (00:54:03):
A little extra layer to inject into this part of the discussion, that if you go one step upstream from the question about problem aware and solution aware, you may identify that there’s a certain type of person that you want to do business with and a certain type of person you don’t want to do business with. So you may not want to educate people that may require, I don’t know, let’s just say months of education and even then they may not become great customers. They’ll be the… I’m just going to say this in air quotes because I don’t want to offend anybody, but the “tire kicker” type of customer where they’re really not going to take any action and they’re not going to create any change in the life. They’re more of the magic pool, a variety. You don’t see me talking about weight loss. So by identifying that further upstream, it could filter how you approach your creation of your ads and which awareness levels you’re going to target. So it’s just another layer.

Shawn (00:55:18):
Yeah, and that’s so important. Jump in more, André, come on. And this is one of the reasons personalities should come out ins ads a little bit too. If there’s somebody you really don’t want to attract into your world, it’s no judgment against those people, it’s not judgment. We all have a choice of who we work with and the people you just don’t want to work with, your ad copy should sort of hint at that. Right and this is not how I would say it, but sort of riffing on what André just said. If you don’t want to have to spend three weeks to explain to people why the fact that they can’t see their toes is bad for their health, I would… Again, this is a bad example, but what I would be thinking and I would try to do nicer in my copy, but what I would be thinking as I was writing, is a conversation where I’m saying, “Listen, if you don’t even know that this is a problem, I don’t want to waste any more of your time.” Right?

Shawn (00:56:22):
If you haven’t figured out that the fact that you can’t see your toes is not good for your health, I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise move along, right? You’d have to word it a lot differently and this is a tough example, but I inject that in my thinking about ad copy. I want people to be repelled by ads as much, if not more, than I want them to be attracted by them. Attracting people with ads is easy. It’s magical thinking all day, every day, $10,000 times returns by, “Invest a dollar and make $50,000.” Right? That’s easy. You can do it all day long. Just offer people free 100 dollar bills if that’s your deal, but the ad should repel and I think André made that point better. I will talk slower now André, so you can jump in more. Sorry, I’m just jamming. This next one is old. There are lot of questions. In this one module by module, so I’m just going to go through these.

Shawn (00:57:25):
All right. Module zero, in the audience and offer masterclass where we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of defining the right price points and overall packaging the offer. For example, selling an online course and adding coaches and calls to it, having him sell for the coaching, et cetera. Short answer is no, I can’t define your point for you and I shouldn’t. I do want to address something though. You’ll get there and price is a funny thing. When I teach at Vermont Tech, one of the questions I asked students is we needed to define value and it’s an hour long conversation and we get to this point where we realize we don’t actually know what value is and the definition of value that I sort of reveal that I’ve found, I don’t know where I found this, I didn’t invent it, is value is the difference between what you pay for something and what you get for it.

Shawn (00:58:17):
So if I go to Starbucks and pay $2 and 60 cents for a small cup of coffee, the value of that cup of coffee to me is greater than having $2 and 60 cents in my wallet. For some people several years ago, I think it was the most expensive Ford Mustang ever sold, over a million dollars at auction, was it worth it? You see this question a lot. Was it worth it? Well, it was clearly worth it because it’s sold for over a million dollars. To somebody out in the world, having that million dollar Mustang in his or her collection was worth more than having the million dollars. That’s what value is. When we talk about pricing, it comes down to a lot of factors. How are you trying to have more students or fewer students? Lots of different things go into it.

Shawn (00:59:07):
We’ll talk about that probably on the next… I’m talking myself into answering the questions, which is funny. We’ll probably talk about that a little bit in the next Q and A call. And one thing I do want to address in this question, it’s in quotes “Packaging of the offer.” Packaging of the offer is the offer, right? That’s what I want to really emphasize that. What goes into the offer is the offer. The online course is not the offer. So the online course is the product. The online course with a live Q and A with this at a discounted price is an offer. That packaging is the offer. It took me a long time to understand this distinction and I really want you all to understand this distinction. All of the things that are in exchange for the sale in that moment in time are what constitute the offer, it is not the underlying product itself and that knowing that difference is critical.

Shawn (01:00:09):
All right, next question. Will we go into how to define front end versus back end offers? We kind of have to. If so, how do we define a front end offer that delivers awesome value without cannibalizing your back end offer? We’ll talk about that. How to find a sweet spot between too little value and too much. I don’t know necessarily that you can give too much value on the front end. I mean I get it. I get the question here, right? The question is if we have, I don’t know, 100% of a certain amount of content and the front end is $97 and we give 80% of that content and I get that. That’s really the question but the question, I would sort of change the question and go upstream a little bit and say, “I have this opportunity. I’ve made the boundaries around what the front end is, right?” It’s going to be about this thing but there is no boundary about how much I’m going to give you in value about that thing.

Shawn (01:01:13):
I’m just not going to give you lots of other value about these other things that are in the back end that you need to look at later. That’s how I look at it. I never want to be in a position where I’m thinking on the front end, “Okay, I can only tell you 10% of what you need to know about this topic because I’m charging you 10% of what the core offers.” I hate that idea. What I want to say instead is, “I have this thing on the front end that I think is really the first thing you might be interested in and I am going to give you my heart and soul about that first thing over the top because I want you to understand it backwards and forwards and then after that, the next thing that I think will be valuable to you, I’m going to do the same thing with that and it’s much more expanded than everything else,” but I’m not trying to mix them together, if that makes sense. That may not make sense to anybody. Got anything to add on that André?

André (01:02:11):
I think that’s it. I think that’s a great way to to frame it for people.

Shawn (01:02:21):
Yeah. Lauren just threw something in the chat too. Thank you Lauren. Said, “You can’t give too much value on your front end, but don’t confuse tons of content with value. It’s better for people to actually consume your front end content than just for everybody’s benefit.” I mentioned this every time Lauren and I have a conversation so everybody knows Lauren and I have worked together for a year and a half or so. When I call Lauren out, it’s because Lauren and I are really good friends. I know how Lauren thinks and how valuable his contributions are. So Lauren’s point is very well taken here. They’re confusing like, “Oh, I’d have 12 bonuses and you get 86 videos.” How many times have you purchased something and felt like, “Oh my God, I don’t need these 300 things.” Right? I don’t need the 80 expressions of this one thing and in fact, there’s often much greater value in cutting through all that bullshit and saying instead of giving you a thousand things to think about, knowing that you’ll be tired by number 200 and you’ll never get through them.

Shawn (01:03:26):
Instead of the thousand and when I tell you the three that matter most and how to get the most value out of knowing these three things in the next 72 hours, that’s valuable. That’s what sells the next thing. The person who can cut through all the clutter and say, “I could tell you a thousand things only of which six actually would benefit you, but instead I’m going to tell you those six and I’m going to tell you right now, today how to get the most out of one of them.” That is extreme value. Those are the people that you want to buy more from. Assuming your industry or your thing is amenable to that. Which most are, if we’re talking e-commerce, hard products, stuff that’s-

Shawn (01:04:00):
So that, which most are, for timeout, E-commerce, hard product stuff that’s obviously not relevant to that.

André (01:04:06):
Yeah. I think in almost every case a 10 or 15 page PDF would be a lot more valuable than buying a whole book that’s 400 pages. Less is more, right?

Shawn (01:04:25):
I think it’s funny that whatever the guy’s name, who wrote Essentialism, it’s kind of a long book. [crosstalk 00:00: 29].

André (01:04:32):
Yeah.

Shawn (01:04:33):
All right. This is a long series of questions. Module two. If the person who wrote this as listening, thank you for this structure of this, and it made it really easy to think through this. So, this is module one, section two, A, and he’s quoting things that I’ve said as he goes through. So, the quote is “No right way. Would it be fair to add that the mechanism should suit the audience too?” For example, he sells an online course for motorcycle riding, so the audience expects to see some motorcycle action, versus having a multi page [inaudible 01:05:07] site based on text. This is such a great question and this is such a great distinction. There is a reason that the overwhelming majority of content from the traffic engine is going to be written. It’s because it was sold through the written word. It was described with a written word by two people who love the written word. How weird would it have been… And I sort of did this with one of the modules that would have been a lot easier to just explain it I think out loud in a video, and as I was doing it I just kept going with it. I just knew, I like stopped eventually because how strange would it be to sell with the written word.

Shawn (01:05:45):
And really this precision of language and this affection, André, I have for the written word, and then take you to a product that was delivered in six videos. And I’ve had that happen a lot. Drives me absolutely crazy. So, the mechanisms suiting the audience, it’s critical. If you sell with video and then your content probably should be video, right? I mean, now if it’s a VSL that’s sort of a gray area, but at least… I mean it sounds so obvious, but think about that. At least give it some thought. There are some things, and you’re going to find in the traffic engine before it’s over, you’re going to find some screen cast videos, like of me showing stuff on screen because it’s better that way for you. You’re going to… I think, there will be an audio or two of me thinking out loud about some stuff, really to get rid of this idea that of the polished final product.

Shawn (01:06:41):
There’ll be times when there are thoughts and I just, I need to think out loud so you can see that there’s so many different variations. It’s going to be in there, but it can’t be the bulk of it. It just can’t because it would be jarring to the audience if how you were sold into something was described was completely countered to what you were delivered. I mean, God forbid, if you showed up and it was all videos of me, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody, that would just be weird. All right. Two B, quote, unquote “measure the results. Would you please share the best practices when tracking an [ad 01:07:14] Sphere of Influence AutoResponder Madness Funnel to enable proper data-driven decision making?” Later. I will do that when we get to that point. Quit jumping ahead. Let’s see.

Shawn (01:07:27):
Next one. Quote, “Few things matter. How do you determine what elements are part of the 1%? How do you determine the impacts? Assuming this one will be bringing the answer in the vein of hypothesis to be tested. I’d be interested in knowing what would be the basis for the hypothesis? How do you measure the results of the test?” This is a hard question. So yes, and we know no one quotes. We know that in general few things matter and figuring out what those things are is hard work and it’s worth [inaudible 01:07:59]. So, it’s also we have to be cautious. I had this conversation with your friend the other day. He said like, he’s talking about… My question was, to this person who knows a lot about the 80-20 principle, was is it true? Do we really think the 80-20 principle, that has really derived from large data set thinking, applies at the individual level?

Shawn (01:08:24):
So, this thing that Tim Ferriss did with the four hour work week, and you hear this a lot, like how many people have you heard say, “I did an 80-20 analysis on my time and my business and it changed everything.” I don’t know and I can find no evidence that suggests the 80-20 principle scales down to the level of the individual. It’s a concept. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know, but is not at all what [Prado 01:08:52] was talking about. He was talking about [inaudible 01:08:55] large data sets. So, with this idea that feels things matter… In this conversation I had with a friend the other day was, his counter argument was, “Well, I just worked on this webinar and that webinar is probably going to generate tens of thousands of dollars in sales. So, isn’t it true that the hour and a half that I spent working on this webinar is worth way more money?” From the perspective of his use of his time than the other things he did that day?

Shawn (01:09:26):
And the obvious answer is yes there are things that are more important, but the less obvious answer is that webinar exists within a broader context and if that broader context didn’t exist the webinar would be useless. Like he can’t just go out and like, “Hey, I have this webinar and it generates money.” It doesn’t do when it’s on its own, it’s part of a system. So, my… This is a very long circuitous route to get back to this question, how do we find the 1%? I think we’ve got to be really, really careful when we do this exercise that we don’t get reductionist and say, “Well, I have 10 things that happen in my business and I think because this thing is the closest to the point at which the money starts to show up, that must be more important so let me focus there.”

Shawn (01:10:14):
I think that’s a dangerous assumption. I think what we need to do instead, is to look a little more broadly and realize that there are things that, by their nature, are more important. Understanding your audience, critically important. Knowing the language of your audience, critically important. Taking the time to understand the [inaudible 01:10:37] needs of your audience, that thing that really motivates them, and that’s part two of the audience and offer master classes, where we’re doing next. Those are really high value activities. And what I see a lot… This is sort of one of my pet peeves, maybe more than, this is one of several pet peeves, but this is a big one, which is, we see something that’s successful like a big promotion that’s successful and everybody sits down and dissects that promotion. What did that thing do and why did it do that?

Shawn (01:11:15):
And they look at the structure of it, it’s like, “Oh, well there were three upsells instead of one.” They look at the parts, but the reality was the thing that that drove everything was that the idea was really valuable. It was a really interesting insight that somebody had that they expressed wealth through the written word and everything that follows was the byproduct of that. Like the whole structure seemed better, but only because the messaging and the idea was so good. So, if you have a… And this is something I say to clients a lot when they ask me to think about what should I expect, and the thing I say early on is, if you have a really good offer I can look like a hero and if your offer is tailored terrible there’s probably unlikely that I can do anything. I have a client that’s in the… There’s a ski resort primarily in the winter time, and when they hired, I do digital marketing.

Shawn (01:12:05):
When they hired a marketing agency, the owner of a marketing agency took me to lunch and said, ” [inaudible 01:12:10] what do I need to know about this client in this market?” And I said, “It’s simple. When it snows we’re heroes and when it doesn’t we’re idiots.” And she looked at me and said, “It can’t be that simple,” and I said, “It is that simple.” Right? That it is that simple. So, these one… Getting back to this evening’s matter. Don’t gloss over the big things like the value proposition, and we’re going to get into part two of the audience and offer masterclass. Don’t gloss over the fact that the thing that you’re selling, the impact it makes on the person who buys it is a thousand times more important than how you sell the damn thing, right? How you sell it is a sole… And I understand that you’re being taught something different, right?

Shawn (01:12:57):
And I don’t want to name any names about… and I’ll, I mean, I will, but if you go to Funnel Hacking Live the underlying message of ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson, who I don’t know personally and this is not a dig at him personally, but the underlying message is if you just have the right template to follow and the right technology to execute that success follows. And he’s partly right. You need the ability to bring your offer out into the world, but if your offer is not valuable no amount of technology or structure or wishful thinking is going to make it work. The offer has to be excellent for the person who’s paying the money for it. It has to be far more valuable for them to have it than to have the money that they’re exchanging. That’s a big mover. That’s a few things matter.

Shawn (01:13:50):
Don’t ever forget that you’re in the business of changing somebody’s life in exchange for some value, maybe a little bit. Maybe you’re solving a problem that’s a nagging issue or maybe you’re showing them a way that’s going to change their life for the better for the next 50 years. But you’re changing lives with what you’re selling, and how that change happens and what the change is and who it matters to, that’s the big driver. The rest of them, the mechanisms to get there, it’s yawn. André, you must have some thoughts about this. I’m sick of hearing my own voice.

André (01:14:24):
Yeah. Let me add another layer to this or another perspective anyway. And I guess you’ve expressed an element of this inside of your part one of your audience and offer masterclass. That is the few things that matter. That’s subjectively… For me, it’s going to be subjectively different than it is for you. So for example, there’s things that I just can’t or won’t do because I don’t like it, I don’t enjoy it, I refuse to do it, which is video and audio, kind of like what I’m doing now, and I’ve chosen to focus on the written word, right? So, most of our marketing is around that, is around long form copy, and that’s never going to change. When it does finally change, I’ll go and write books, but until it you know, this is the way that I express stuff and within the context of that, that’s going to be one of the few things that matter for me.

André (01:15:34):
So, I have to go and get a writing coach because it’s the one thing that I have to focus on because I don’t want to or I don’t have the ability to do any of the other things. Now for other people, they might be great with video and terrible at the written word. Well, then they’re few things that matter is probably going to fit into that. I’m trying to think, we’ll zoom out and you know, should I do written or should I do video or should I do this mechanism or that mechanism? And then you try to cherry pick the ones that other people are good at and then you’re going to correct your version. Okay. Now if I just get good at this, this, this, and this, I’m going to have the world’s best thing, system machine. And I don’t think that’s correct because objectively there is nothing that’s the best at whatever, right? So, you need to subjectively figure out what you choose to do. Just like what skills you want to express into the world and the market that you go after.

André (01:16:38):
Yes I know I’m kind of rambling now, but I think those things that matter, once you’ve figured them out and then you decide to doubled down on them, it makes a lot of things easier.

Shawn (01:16:54):
Yeah. And I think where the other side of that is. We will at some point have to start looking for the constraint in the systems that we design and that’s hard, right? The theory of constraints tells us it’s sort of predicated on systems theory and tells us that any complicated system has one and only one constraint, and there’s one bottleneck in the whole system. Generally in a small business, the bottleneck is us. It’s easy to find. There also, then you can kind of go meta their belief constraints. From the longest time I had a belief constraint in my business that I didn’t see and I sort of saw it all at once because I was getting a cup of coffee and it was sort of this overwhelming, borderline Satori moment of like how did I not see this whole time?

Shawn (01:17:37):
And just to put that in perspective, now I feel like I’ve opened a loop for everybody, which is fun. I like to do it to André, but not everybody. The belief constraint that I had in my business… The question I was trying to solve, and I spent a lot of time on this, was increasing revenue with a small business and realizing I put myself in a choice, either I had to increase my hourly rates, this was when I was primarily a freelancer with a small team, and to increase my hourly rate or add to the team of more people who could contribute to you at the current hourly rate. Those were sort of these two choices that I was wrestling with. And as I was getting my cup of coffee, I realized that if I moved upstream and disconnected my earnings from the amount of time that I worked then that would solve that problem immediately.

Shawn (01:18:23):
And it was… How I thought about it was the problem. So, belief constraints are sort of tricky. They’re hard to find, but when you find they’re often very powerful. So, there is a way to find these things that critically matter functionally, but the things that really matter are not the functional things. Like their how to do the things. The things that really matter are the expression of what it is that you’re doing and the value and how that’s valuable too. And I think probably the single greatest, like the highest point of leverage, if I look across two [inaudible 01:18:59] decades of clients and tremendous amount of experience, the biggest hinge that’s sort of… The hinge that swings the biggest door, by far, is connecting what it is that you’re doing with the deep internal felt need of the audience, not the thing they tell you, right? Like the thing…

Shawn (01:19:20):
Here’s a distinction. If you’re in the biz op space in [inaudible 01:19:25], business opportunity space or make money online space, when you ask people what they want they tell you that they want to make money. That’s not what they want. That’s an expression of what they want. They want to feel capable. They want to be respected. They don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they are a failure [inaudible 00:01:19:44], these deep felt needs when you speak to those needs, either overtly or implicitly, that swings everything. So, spending time on that and that’s really the second part of the audience and offer masterclass is really around how we find those things, but that… Spend the time there and everything that follows is more valuable. All right. Let’s see. Next questioner.

Shawn (01:20:12):
Oh, you mentioned in module one not to use you and your in Facebook ads. Well, you may cover this in depth later, which I will, I’m running ads now and would love any guidance on the language of how we address our audience. Is this the personal story approach using I or is it using we in some form? I suspect the answer is it depends or it’s both, but I’m curious. Is there any guidance you can give? I’m more comfortable writing I, but aware it can become pretty self-indulgent. If treated with care, find real lot harder, but it feels like it can be more powerful. Trying to look at it from the perspective of my audience. My brain keeps feeling like it’s going to break. You’re doing it right though. Once you feel like your brain hurts you know you’re doing this work, right. So, you’ve given yourself, instead of a choice, you’ve given yourself a dilemma, right?

Shawn (01:21:06):
Do I say your or do I say I or… That’s not the choice. Here’s the challenge with you and your, and I think Lauren and I may… Lauren probably, his perspective… I’ll tell you my perspective and what I think his perspective is, which is always fun, and he may add [inaudible 01:21:28] that I’ve completely misinterpreted his perspective. But my interpretation from a couple of conversations with a Facebook rep is that Facebook is looking for examples of you and your programmatically with AI, and because that they consider that direct language it will trigger… Essentially higher likelihood to trigger that disapproval, programmatically. Now a person may come in and change that saying that’s not a big deal, but my understanding is it triggers a review because you and your tend to be very direct language. So, I think based on previous conversations with Lauren, Lauren thinks it’s a little less black and white than that is, and I suspect he is more right than I am just in general about anything tactically related to Facebook and the execution of Facebook is far closer to that [inaudible 01:22:18].

Shawn (01:22:20):
The concept here though is really important, right? So, if you say in a Facebook ad, are you trying to lose weight, question mark. Your very directly speaking to somebody in their personal space, in their social space. That’s not how people communicate in that environment. They don’t. I mean some people do and those aren’t necessarily the most fun to read, but if you look at how people communicate on Facebook, [inaudible 01:22:51] long things. It’s not ad copy. It’s not that. So. And if you tell your story, like here’s how I taught so-and-so how to lose all this weight. Well, okay. I mean that’s one way to think about it. Or we could lose weight this way. I mean it sounds weird. That’s not how, in the social environment, most people communicate.

Shawn (01:23:18):
So, there are some functional options. This was, I just looked through my notes, a conversation with a Facebook rep and one of the things that he had said as an example is we had asked a question that had you in it and he just changed the question. So, in this example it can be instead of saying, are you trying to lose weight, question mark. You could just say, trying to lose weight, question mark. Right? Like you’s not in there. It’s just sort of more broad. I don’t love that, but it would work. It just, it solves the functional problem which is you are your, it’s not in the language, but if you listen to Facebook reps more, if you sort of deconstruct what seems to do better, what you see is there is more…

Shawn (01:23:59):
There’s one more part of this to understand too. Facebook does not, I say allow, I want to be cautious and not allow, like they don’t want it and when they see it they don’t let you do it really, which is claim in a timeframe. Lose 20 pounds in 10 days. Facebook doesn’t want it. When they see it it’s a huge problem. Just don’t do claim in a timeframe. Don’t try to advertise on Facebook, right? Like Facebook is not an environment to advertise. When we get into the Facebook thing, we’ll talk about that distinction because I know you’re like, “Wait a minute. Is this a paid traffic course with Facebook?” Yes, but it’s a different mentality. So, the way to think about this instead is how somebody having a social conversation that’s in somebody else’s newsfeed, which is their personal space, what would this same thing most likely look like?

Shawn (01:24:48):
It might look something like, and I’m just… This is not well written, but this is the idea. It might look something like, Lisa took this pill and two months later she looked 20 years younger. You can’t say that because it’s claim to a timeframe, but what we can do is we can tell Lisa’s story about what life was like before and we can tell Lisa’s story about now or sort of after, and we can use dialogue and we can use the narrative arc, and we can talk about this person and it can be a real person who had a real result. We have to be very careful about making the claim that the thing that we sold got them this result, but we’re telling somebody else’s story of an experience that they had, that we hope is the same experience that the audience that we’ve targeted hopes to have, right?

Shawn (01:25:36):
We hope that they’re some percentage of that audience, is dealing with something where the solution we have to offer is right for them and that when they see that somebody else had the same things going on that they had and got a better result, that that’s attractive to them because this is a social selling environment. Capital S Social. Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny lower case s selling. Facebook’s not a selling environment and we’re trying to make Facebook do something it was not designed to do. And so, we have to constantly reorient to what Facebook really is trying to do, which is entertain and distract, not sell. So, okay. I don’t want to talk about Facebook, but I’m talking about Facebook. There were four more follow up questions about this.

Shawn (01:26:28):
So, I’ve been reflecting on this question. It’s deeper than he asked. Curious about language traps. Now, the reference he used, my partner who’s a Chinese medicine practitioner, has had posts taken down. He thinks because he suggested too strongly that the herbs they should sell actually work. So, if somebody said in a Facebook ad, “Here. Buy this herb and get this result,” that is why their ads got shut down, right? Facebook does not want that on its platform. It’s not Google and if someone didn’t search for [inaudible 00:23:02]. Google has issues for this too, if it’s not FDA approved. So, it’s tough to sell anything health related because by definition, those things have results that we’re looking for. Like, “Oh, do your joints hurt? Take this pill and your joints will feel better.” That’s not… That’s very, very difficult to do. So, however… So, here’s sort of what the note that I wrote to myself because it made me think of a friend and how she did this, and how that’s the perfect example of how you could do this in an environment like Facebook.

Shawn (01:27:34):
Stop thinking about Facebook as quote, unquote writing ads, right? You’re not writing ads on Facebook because it’s a social platform disguised itself as an advertising platform. The irony is that Facebook doesn’t like ads, right? It sounds crazy and yes you’ll see ads and yes some of them work in particularly for E-commerce, which Facebook seems to favor, but, in general, writing ads on Facebook is not the way to think about. Writing ads as “Buy herb X and get benefit Y,” that’s not social. That’s not how people communicate.

Shawn (01:28:10):
Now, recently I had this experience where someone, in a group I belonged to, it was her first time in the group and she told the story about… In the story was, and this is a very simple example, simplified, but this is kind of what she said. She had been struggling with something health wise. She had exhausted like every possible solution that she was aware of in traditional western medicine. She met somebody with a totally different approach she’d never heard about and now three months later she feels incredible, right? And she can’t even believe it. And that’s how somebody would tell that story. It’s exactly how she told the story, right? That’s how human beings communicate socially. Like, “Oh, there was this thing,”… And she reached a point of desperation, right? She didn’t feel well. It ended up being a weird food allergy, but she sort of walked through this whole process.

Shawn (01:29:04):
I had this thing, I couldn’t figure it out. The places that most people would normally look to figure this out, they didn’t have solutions for me. I was ready to give up. I stumbled on this other thing, that I had no idea even was out there and which was functional medicine, and then now here I am, fast forward to the future and I’m a totally different person and all those problems have gone away. That’s a, I don’t want to say template [inaudible 00:25:29]. It’s a conceptual template. Here’s where I was, this is what it felt like. I didn’t know what to do. I found X. Everything changed. That’s social. That’s how we talk to each other. Okay. André, any thoughts on this jump? Just interrupt me because I keep running my yap here.

Shawn (01:29:47):
No? Okay. So, I’m at the last set of long questions and then we’ll go to the questions that were posted. Okay. Once you can literally… This is a quote from me, it’s always fun when people quote back to you, ask you what the hell you meant. Once you can literally, this is my center on the modules. Once you can literally see how your business functions structurally and associate the appropriate metrics to each part everything becomes easier and more effective. The question is what do you mean by structure? Can you define it a bit more? Great question. I think structurally, visually, I think structurally. So, let’s imagine a four page, multi page presale site to a seven part email autoresponder sequence. A product sequence to an offer page to an order form to a receipt. Like that would be a… And we’re going to advertise this through Facebook.

Shawn (01:30:52):
So structurally, if I were to draw this, I would put a box for the ad or several boxes for the ads, and then I would have an arrow that went to page one of the multi page presale site and I would have each of those pages as individual boxes and arrows to each because it’s sequential. And then on page four, I would maybe have a little choice you know a opt in, like a little diamond shape that’s sort of the choice. Opt in, yes or no. And if no, what happens and if yes, then they get the first email. And then on a second day, the second email. I’d have all seven emails drawn, just little boxes, and then from the last email I would have an arrow to another box that represented a sales page, another box that represented the order form, and then another box that represented success.

Shawn (01:31:44):
I would want to see all of that because now when I see that I can start putting in numbers and I can know how… [inaudible 01:31:53] let’s just for the sake of [inaudible 01:31:55] system. The boundaries of the system are on either side of that. So, when I sit down and say, “Well, this ad has a 6% click-through rate,” I can put a number on it. Okay, add 6% of the people who see this ad click to this page. Okay, got it. Or my page one to page two conversion is 50%. Half the people who see the first page make it to the second page, or my first page to fourth page conversion rate is 10%. So, a 100 people see page one 10 of them see page four by opt-in rate. Like I can calculate all of those things because I have drawn out the parts and because I can see the parts I can then figure out how to measure the parts.

Shawn (01:32:41):
And like what measurements matter and what measurements I might want to think about because I might want to know… I might want to ask questions like for every 100 people who click on an ad and see page one, how many of them see the order page versus how many of them order, right? And I might find out that, let’s just say that for every 100 people who come in ten see the order page and only one orders. Well, that’s interesting. Why would somebody go through four pages of content, seven days of email, and only 10% of them finally accept the offer? Where did I go wrong? Because I can see it all I can start to ask some really good questions. So, that’s why you need about structure of it. It’s the boxes and arrows. That would’ve been a simpler answer.

Shawn (01:33:38):
An individual who was more likely to become a lead according to one indicator may be no more, this is me saying this, may be no more likely to buy online than another user according to another indicator. Facebook’s algorithm can do the heavy lifting and it’s our responsibility to give it clear instructions and let it go to work. We’ll discuss that in modules five and six. How do I optimize… Listen this is the question. How do I optimize for sales if I’m running a lead campaign, excuse me, and a sale might be generated six weeks down the line, or do I need to wait until modules five and six. Yes, but he did ask for some pointers. So, this is a big challenge, and there’s some comments. Lauren and I have talked about this a little bit in the comments in about different modules.

Shawn (01:34:21):
This is a challenge because we want, in an ideal world, we want Facebook to go find the people who do the thing we care about most. In this case buy. But if they don’t buy for six weeks, if they don’t buy for 15 days, they… Who knows? That’s hard. So the way we break things apart, occasionally, is we might say, the wrong way to deal to say, “Let’s just optimize for leads and know that [inaudible 01:34:54] email do the heavy lifting.” That’s only true… This is where systems theory is very helpful because if you make the decision to optimize for leads and then focus myopically on things that gets you more leads, you’re missing the point. So yes, you can optimize for leads, but you can optimize for leads with a system that you built to produce the customers who will eventually buy.

Shawn (01:35:22):
So, I realize that sounds crazy, but here’s the distinction. If we say to Facebook we want to optimize for leads and we have a multi page pre-sale site with three pages of content that establishes the beliefs our audience needs to accept and internalize before they can become customers, that’s congruent with the overall idea of what we’re doing. Assuming that’s what our funnel looks like. That makes sense. But if that produces $16 leads and your buddy says, “$16 leads? I get $2 leads all day long,” and then you go look at what your buddy’s doing. Your buddy is offering six free reports and a [Coleridge 00:32:01], a landing page with-

Shawn (01:36:00):
Six free reports and a co-reg, landing page with 16 bells and whistles and free videos and you’re like, “Oh, I should do that.” You’ve missed the point. Because, yes, you get $2 leads and they’re worthless, generally or they’re worth way less than your $16 leads. What we need to do here is we need to say, “Sure, we may have to optimize for leads.” But we’re optimizing for leads within the context of what we expect those leads to do later. We’re not just looking at lead generation as a separate thing and trying to do it optimally to get a lower cost per lead. I used that example in one of the modules, I believe, and it’s so common, so incredibly common.

Shawn (01:36:46):
It’s more just like, “Your lead costs are way too high. You have to look at it within the context of the system and I am much more willing to pay two, three, four, five times as much for a lead that has gone through lots of hoops, because it shows the intent and the quality’s much higher than to optimize a system to produce a false positive.” That’s really the distinction. Anything contributes to that, André? Somebody wants to hear your voice in the chat. You’re also a deep resident, very white voice.

André (01:37:17):
No, I think that you’ve made the point crystal clear and I think that’s a great distinction, is to build a system as it needs to exist to create the customers you want to create at the end of the day. You don’t have a separate system for leads and a separate system for sales, it’s one. The fact that you can’t generate customers initially because it just takes a little while for that to happen, that’s fine. But like I said, don’t change the system. Don’t build something different, yeah.

Shawn (01:37:55):
All right. This is the last of the written questions that were sent over in advance. Principle number three, focus your time, energy, and dollars disproportionately on what matters and performs best. This is a question about my opinion on creating content for organic posts on Facebook. This person says you seem to spend way too much time creating beautiful, so he’s told high value content gets good engagement from his point of view. But when he checks the stats, I see that although a good number of folks visit his website and engage with content, very few appeared to opt in to his list and purchases his products.

Shawn (01:38:28):
This is really, really critical to understand. I had a client that did this years ago and it was fascinating to me. They spent a quarter of a million dollars on focus groups. This was an eCommerce product. They spent a quarter of a million dollars on focus groups to find their absolutely ideal audience. That audience later, when they structured the sider for them and the product and everything else. That audience later, was part of a big matrix we created using Facebook advertising to see really where their audience was. Their focus group audience was in there. We had that and then we had, I think… It was the largest group of variables we ever used, it was crazy, we had 478 ads, which is ridiculous to think about when we first launched this. But what we were trying to figure out is how valuable was that audience to them. Because all I heard about every time we had meetings there over and over, “This is our audience. This is what matters.”

Shawn (01:39:26):
And again, quarter million dollars on focus groups, this is real money. That audience consumed their content at a rate 10 times anybody else. This wasn’t a political bent, but there was an interest in that for this particular product. There’s appeal to a type of person. Their core audience that they had spent the money to identify, consume their content at rates greater than anybody else. They emailed, they commented, they did everything at rates higher than everything else, except they didn’t buy. And when I say they didn’t buy, I mean they did not buy at all. They optimized not because the product didn’t sell, products sold very well, but it sold two entirely different people than they imagined. Yet, I would still have conversations in it… And that still, in their mind was their audience, because they would say… Looking through this description that this person shared here, you get good engagement, you get all these other things. If that’s the business that you’re in, that’s a great result. But if you’re not in that business, if you’re in the customer business, it’s not a great result, it’s an relevant result.

Shawn (01:40:47):
Somebody engages with your content and they do everything that you want them to do, except the thing that matters most that they do. They didn’t do anything that you want them to do. At the end of the day, they didn’t. It gets back to the… And I don’t say this to be a jerk, it’s just so hard to understand it, because it seems like, this is exactly what I want to have happen. Yet, the thing that matters most doesn’t happen. If the thing that doesn’t matter most doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t really matter. And it’s hard, because everything else points the way. Everything was like, “Well, they’re doing all these other things.”

Shawn (01:41:22):
And that particular client I referenced before, they never abandoned that belief that, that was their audience. Their audience, they thought, was a particular gender, and a particular age, and a particular blend of psychographic characteristics. And their actual customer was, for the most part, a different gender, in a wildly different location, and a different age. I mean, it couldn’t have been more… There were three or four factors that were completely the opposite of who their actual customer was. Yet, that entire business continued to focus on their quote, unquote core customer who never bought. It sounds weird, when I say it, they go like, “What business would do that?” Lots of businesses do, that’s very common. So, I want to be cautious.

Shawn (01:42:13):
I’m not an organic Facebook guy, that’s not my thing. Paid traffic makes more sense. I don’t want to be talking a lot about Facebook, but it’s just such a real gem of an idea in here around this. When people do all the things we want them to do except the most important thing they need to do, is that still good? And the answer is really no. I mean, it’s good to get social service I guess, but they’re not really doing the thing we care about.

Shawn (01:42:40):
All right, when I saw through Facebook ads and results are great to this person. If is there a way to create organic content effectively? Not my area of expertise. I mean, it kind of gets back. I think I’ll wrap up all of these in this one question, when we get to the Facebook modules, we’re going to talk about what I believe is the 1% way to think about creating a good Facebook ad. And it’s, can you use the same idea for organic content? Maybe? Should you? I’m less inclined just because of the reach of organic Facebook to suggest that and some other confounding factors. So, we’re probably not going to get into a lot of discussion to that. All right André, how do you want to do the Q&A that was submitted? That’s all the questions that were in the seven pages.

André (01:43:26):
Yeah it is. There’s a lot of-

Shawn (01:43:28):
[crosstalk 01:43:28] those, do you want to go back and forth? How do you want to do the-

André (01:43:33):
Yeah. If we start at the top, which was the first questions that came in, I think, presumably, most of those are going to have been answered already because they were made two hours ago. [crosstalk 01:43:45].

Shawn (01:43:44):
I will stick on this first one?

André (01:43:49):
Yeah, yeah.

Shawn (01:43:51):
We’ll jump on a few and then just, well, you jump in too. [crosstalk 01:43:54]. First question, “How are we going to test sales pages? Do we have a special method to know if the sales page works?” Sales page testing to me feels incredibly reductionist, unless it’s a wildly different sales page. I’d rather test sales methods. When I do my offer, I’m going to do totally different approaches. There’s going to be a straight to sale version, then there’s going to be a multi-page presell site to autoresponder madness sequence, those are big things, like-

André (01:44:31):
Big swings?

Shawn (01:44:32):
No.

André (01:44:32):
Eventually, should we test sales pages when we get to a level of refinement later?

Shawn (01:44:38):
Yes. But that’s more incremental optimization and I want exponential differences. At least, in the first eight weeks, we’re going to be focusing on the potential for exponential gain. And then, once we get the exponential world, we’ll do incremental later.

Shawn (01:44:58):
Let’s see. So we answered that. Oh sorry, you got to figure how this works. Next question, “What happens if we cannot spend thousands of dollars, and then we just start testing with hundreds?” Spending too much will be a big mistake. To avoid is 100 to 500, a good range, and you don’t have to spend a fortune, let me clear about that. You need to spend enough money to get an answer to the question that you’re asking, and if you ask a really good question, you can get an answer faster. You can ask the question, “Which of these three ads is better?” But that might be a more expensive question to answer because it’s three variables and who knows, lots of different things. You can ask a question like, “Does this message resonate with the audience that I’ve targeted and get people to opt in for X, Y, Z?” That’s a pretty inexpensive test. And we’ll talk about how we structure that.

Shawn (01:45:57):
You don’t need a fortune and you shouldn’t start with a fortune, to be clear. Starting with a lot of ad spend, actually makes this way more difficult. It’s much harder to spend ad spend intelligently when there’s a lot of it to keep your eye on the ball and a lot of what we’re going to be doing. And really it’s the foundation of the success I’ve had in ad words, is we are going to be so focused on what we’re doing, that we’re going to understand it so well, that it’s going to be part of our DNA so that as we add to it, our understanding grows instead of our confusion grows. It’s very easy to add on and have our confusion levels either go incrementally or exponentially to the point where you don’t know what’s working. And we’re going to make things prove that they work or they don’t stick around. That’s the big difference. [crosstalk 00:10:49].

André (01:46:50):
Would you say that even if somebody has a relatively big budget, that it’s better to artificially create a constraint that forces you to create some limitation in how much you can spend daily or weekly on ads. Maybe say, 500 and what can you do with $500 or whatever that number is, but it’s way less than the money that you’ve got in the bank account.

Shawn (01:47:21):
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Sorry, I’m coughing. It’s that and one other thing. That by itself is required, it’s sufficient. It’s necessary but not sufficient. That’s one of two things that people need to do. One, you need to artificially lower your budget. And the other thing you need to know is, a different way to use a lower budget intelligently. Because if you just artificially lower your budget, then you’re going to get the same pathetic result, but just less money and frustrating. I’ll use an example of that I think will help everybody understand that. As I may have hinted at this in the past and I may have even used it, but it’s… I think I’m going to use it again in the AdWords module because it’s just so powerful. A former employee of mine worked for a company that did… They sold aftermarket auto parts and the owner of the company said, “Here’s your budget.”

Shawn (01:48:16):
And there were, I don’t know, two or three different… I think two or three different product line, different vehicle types within the company, it was like, “You all have to split the budget.” And then there were lots of different parts that the aftermarket community wanted. What ended up happening… And by the time I was called in to look at it, I was calling them, they just said, “Yeah, AdWords doesn’t work.” The thing that I often say, which doesn’t endear me to everybody, as you know, the way you’re doing AdWords doesn’t work. But what they were doing is they were taking this chunk of… It wasn’t a ton of money, it was a chunk of money, and they were spreading it out horizontally in a way that it was never going to produce the result that they wanted. It’s just impossible.

Shawn (01:49:03):
They could have taken that dollar amount, and made it 10%, and they still would have had a pathetic result. What they needed to do instead… And this is the exercise that I took them through. I said, “Okay, where do you ship the products from?” And they told me where the location was. I’m like, “Okay, let’s look at a UPS map. Where do you ship the products that they get their automatically in two days by UPS?” And they showed it on the map. I’m like, “Great, the first decision we’re going to make, is we’re only going to advertise to that area, because we’re going to put in our ads, free second day shipping upgrade.” They don’t have to upgrade, because they get it in two days anyway. So, we’re just going to narrow the geography down, first step.

Shawn (01:49:47):
Then I asked “What are the top five products in each of the three different divisions?” And they came back with some of the data, these five products overall, still better than everything else. “Great. What’s the number one product in each of those categories for the three?” Great, now we have three products. And then, we’d do the search terms, are like two or three search terms for each. So then, we completely reduced their budget down so that they only sold to people who got the packages in two days, which was free, but that couldn’t be presented as an upgrade, that was free. And they only sold the number one product for three different categories. And instantly their ROI, the return on ad spend, it was… Not astronomical, but it was exponential. It was, I think, 17X or something, because we did two things.

Shawn (01:50:40):
We narrowed their focus dramatically, only using geography and product and a few other factors, a very narrow focus. And we forced them to use a much lower budget. And then what happened after that? Because the question should be… The how much can we spend question should never be asked. It should be as much money as you can get your hands on if it’s profitable. The whole exercise then became, “Okay, what if we add the second most popular product in that same area? Is it still profitable?” Yes. Okay, great. “What if we add the top five? At what point does the product stop being as profitable as we want?” Okay, stop. Great. Now go back to the number one product, and sell it to the next closes, whatever, five States, but without the free upgrade and shipping, it does not really matter.

Shawn (01:51:31):
In fact, it did really matter. The economics changed, but if they hadn’t broken the whole thing up that way, they never would have seen how wildly different the economics were by product type and geography and messaging, they had to do that. That’s the kind of thinking we’re going to bring to AdWords. That’s what make AdWords magical. Everything in AdWords is context and the context is not obvious. The context is, what was the search term that’s the obvious one that people think about. But what time of day did they make it? Where were they when they made it? All of these factors, when you turn them just right, you can create a vein of profitability, where that profitability is not obvious if you don’t turn the dials just the right way. I said I wasn’t even talking about Facebook, now I’m talking about AdWords. We haven’t done anything without the gyp.

André (01:52:28):
All right. Next question, “In niche selection, I have a business in the health sector, bricks and mortar, there’s high six figure business annually, down to a fraction right now. Do I do something similar online to flooded space?”

Shawn (01:52:44):
I don’t know if I should give advice about this one. This is a challenge because, a couple of things came out as a challenge. One, the world is upside down right now, we all know that, so any results that we get in the current space are strangely contextual results and it may very well be that, our success just follows the upturn of going back to normal, then it’s an uphill battle. And I also know we all need to make money when things are sideways. So, flooded spaces, you can stand out… I think the better answer to this is, email me. You could reply to the email at the Q&A email, that comes directly to me. Reply to that email and let’s have this conversation one-on-one just because that’s a hard one and I need to think about it too and I have a great answer to that.

Shawn (01:53:40):
Okay. Francis. How does the exercise in module two would offer creation change when working with a client. Is that something you’re going to dig deep and the client upsell? It is different with the client. The first part of that part, one, you largely don’t deal with the client. The second part is, where you’d most of your interaction with clients will be, you could have the client… It’s really a question. The question becomes, are you working with a client who already has an offer, the proven offer. Those are the clients you want to work with, it’s hard to prove an offer. It’s hard to… It happens and you can do it, but from a client perspective, you’re more likely to be working someone who has an offer, and the second part of the audience and often masterclass is going to be, what we do after we have offered the turbo charge, also super charge. People are very aware what are the secret charges. Okay.

Shawn (01:54:37):
[Leighton 00:18:38], I hope I pronounced that correctly. As a caviar to that deciding specialization, does it matter? I could be a business coach or expand the product we have online that currently out of space or am I crazy to do something completely new? I don’t think you’re crazy to do something new at all. What is your mission? We want to get joy. I don’t think I saw the part about deciding specialization, so I’m not sure I understand that part of it, but I don’t. I could be a business coach or expand the product we have online and that currently overcrowded. Don’t be afraid of doing something new, and it can be newish. You don’t have to… It’s not binary, you only get to do the new thing and not other things. You can divide your time, there’s lots of ways to approach this, but don’t be afraid to try something new.

Shawn (01:55:29):
Especially if you have the patience to wait to when we get to the masterclass on testing, you can do some really cool stuff without a lot of money, testing ideas on Facebook. It really just… That concept is so revealed itself to me and I’m so excited about sharing that, because it’s scary to think about doing something new when it’s a clean slate. But if you can do something new where you have really good… Even anecdotal data, and I know that if the expression data’s not the plural of anecdote. You can have some pretty good directionally, interesting stuff from an inexpensive test that tells you, “Hey, this thing, I’m thinking about doing that’s newish. It’s got some legs or you can look into the cow. I just heard crickets. I got to rethink that.” So, don’t be afraid of what’s something new. What do you think about that? Doing something new versus not, André? You should answer that one.

André (01:56:22):
That means you’ve got mindspace, I think. I don’t see anything wrong with it, so long as you’re not destroying plan A to go after plan B, that’s probably not the wisest thing to do. But if you keeping plan… The one thing there and you want to do a plan B and a plan C, just explore different things. Yeah, totally, I think that’s a great idea.

Shawn (01:56:51):
All right. Next question, “We have an e-commerce store and we don’t want offers perpetually for each product in our store. So, we need a way to make the best paid ad for the product itself. For some products, which are more generic, cheaper medium water filters, maybe we’ll make a paid ad direct to the user to a category page. For some products, we have a differentiator and we can do a paid ad directly to the product page. So, a specific benefit differentiator about product. While I cover the scenarios, will you please cover in courses scenarios below too?”

Shawn (01:57:26):
All right, there isn’t really a question here other than cover the course. What I’m going to do, just because we’re not really there yet. André, can we save this and this question somehow? I actually know one thing to do, I’ll just screenshot it here. Just give me one second. I’ll capture a screenshot and make sure that we’ll be getting to e-commerce questions that I’m covering these things. e-commerce is kind of its own funny little animal. I want to talk about e-commerce because there are lots of ways to do e-commerce that are stacking the deck in your favor. Hold on, let me just-

André (01:57:57):
Yeah, take a screenshot. But I think Zoom sends the text file of all the Q&A in the comments.

Shawn (01:58:07):
Nice. We are showing everybody our tech shops here.

André (01:58:11):
Scratching it with taking a literal photo of my screen.

Shawn (01:58:16):
I’m not. Remember, I just thought I did. Don’t get too crazy. All right. Hey Gareth, what’s up man? What’s the sweet spot for a front end offer? You have assets ranging from 7 to 197, where do you start? That’s a good question. All right. Where do you start? You have to ask yourself how expensive you think the traffic is going to be. I mean, if you can make $7… Well, that’s not the only consideration. Do you want to build a business on $7 customers? That’s a question to ask yourself first, that’s a different business. And I think Brooke Castillo talked about this in one of the podcast you did with Claire Pells, I think is her name. I think she’s the one who talked about this, maybe not, maybe I’m misremembering it.

Shawn (01:59:05):
I’ve heard someone say this really well, somewhere else. I’m going to give credit where credit’s knew. Building a business on $7 customers, is a very different than building a business on $197 customers. It’s a different customer. They’re not bad people, good people, no judgment about that at all. It’s a different price point and it’s wildly different price point. If it were me… And it’s also a lot easier to buy traffic when you’re making $197 on a sale. If it were me, Gareth, what I would do is, I would start with the 197 offer, and see if I can sell that profitably. Because you just have a of leeway. You got to do more work. It’s a little bit harder, but a 197 customer, I think you’ll be happier with that customer. And 197 is a fine price point for the front end.

Shawn (01:59:55):
You might want to test price points. Test 197 versus 147 versus 199, whatever. I would actually don’t do 197 versus 199, that’s stupid. Do 197 versus 147 versus 97. That’s more of a customer that you want. I worked with too many clients who got wrapped into the book funnel idea and they generated thousands of $10 customers, and to the person that wasn’t the business they wanted. Now, others… I know Lawrence thinking of a specific example, others have turned $10 book sales, upsells into $2,000… I think $2,000 or $1,000 products, in a way that was very congruent, and that’s really what the free plus shipping book offer was supposed to do. Realize when you’re doing a free plus shipping price point at $7, $10, $19, but you’re getting a customer who wants to spend $7, $10, $20, it’s a different customer. Another thing to think about too, just while we’re thinking out loud, often the $7 sale is not to sell a $7 product, it’s to sell a $200 upsell.

Shawn (02:01:14):
If you’ve ever seen any of Mike Gillette’s ads, it’s borderline comical, because it’s like a $10 sale. And the amount of credibility and proof he puts into selling a $10 product, it’s shocking. And when you look at it, why would he do this? Because he’s not selling you the $10 product. He’s selling you the upsell, so that’s something that’d be very to really think about here too is, do you want to lead with $7 or 47 and that upsell to 197, and then all of your content in the whole… Everything is designed to sell the 197. I mean, if you ever do that, my thought is, anyway, just sell the damn thing for 197 and be up front about it, but maybe not.

Shawn (02:01:59):
Here’s what I would do, now that I’ve thought about it out loud for everybody to see how insane I am. I would try to sell it at 197. If I can sell it at 197, I would Pat myself on the back and tell my friends how smart I am and be really psyched about that. If breakeven, unless you need to make money on it. If for some reason I was struggling, I would sell something less, like 27 to 47, and then I would upsell the 197 and see if I can make those economics work. All right, André, what would you do?

André (02:02:29):
I’m just going to throw this out then, that you’re going to find that there’s certain people that will not bought a $7 offer. They know what’s going to come, there’s perception of value. There’s all these things floating around in someone’s head. In many ways, I’m looking at this through [Marnin’s 00:26:57]. I won’t buy anything that’s a $7 product, but I’ll happily spend $500, buy a product, and let’s just say for argument’s sake, within the same category. Because the one is very upfront, I know what I’m going to get. The value proposition is super clear. I can then make an educated guess that this is going to deliver the value that I’m willing to pay for, but $7 doesn’t tell me anything. It’s just, I’m not going to spend the money on the $7. I say that only to demonstrate that perhaps by having the $7 offer, you might be losing customers that would have happily paid the 197 and now they just gone.

André (02:03:37):
So you’ve lost them. Out of those two options, I like what Shawn said. Have the 197 and try to make the one work, because then you’re going to get the people that would never spend the money on the $7 offer. However, I don’t see the value in… Well, what if somebody will only spend the $7 and not the $197. Well, then again, do you want that person as a customer? The person that would only spend the money on the $7 thing and not the 197. So, there’s very little on this through my lens value in maybe going for the lower one. Rather, just stick with the higher one and try make that work. I’ve always liked free and then the higher price. But understand that if you pay for traffic, you need to monetize it. So, I’ll go for the 197.

Shawn (02:04:31):
Keep in mind Gareth too that you’ve asked this question of two people who have oriented their entire lives around disdained for a $7 price entry point offers, so you’re going to get to that answer. Other might give you a different answer. I think the perspective that I would bring to this question, in addition to what André and I both said, is that a complaint I hear a lot… And not that it’s common across projects and clients and colleagues, is that, when they did the lower cost offer, they felt like it was problematic for their business. They felt like they got the wrong customers, so that’s where it came from.

Shawn (02:05:12):
Okay. This is a great question. All the questions are great, but when I say a great questions, it’s one that I want to answer, that’s what I mean. What if you love an audience, like your values align, but you are unsure if they would ever spend money on you. In other words, what if the income of that audience, they can’t afford you. Do change your audience altogether or do you design a product that they can afford?

Shawn (02:05:33):
There’s no right answer to this. So, the purely business person in me says… And I’ve said this in one of the modules already, that if you are not making money on your business, it’s not a business, it’s an expensive hobby. And if you want to go have an expensive hobby… I’m not going to tell you not to do that. If this is a social good endeavor and you’re willing to spend money to do with social good and create products that are either inexpensive, absolutely. If you’re willing to do that from a business lens. And when I say business, I don’t mean transactional. I mean, just that you’re able to feel good about the work that you’re doing, that you’re compensated well for it, that the value you’re bringing into the world, you’re getting value in exchange. That’s what I mean when I think about business.

Shawn (02:06:25):
From that perspective, I would not try to figure out how to extract less money from people who really can’t afford it. I would rather suggest that you go find a market where you can make a boatload of money in it, and make so much money in that other market that you can give away the value you can offer to another audience for free. I think there’s more satisfying to do that. Because it’s hard, it’s hard to take money from people who… Maybe they shouldn’t be spending, even if the value is 1,000 times, it’s just hard.

Shawn (02:07:01):
So, I would try to find an engine that… I don’t know how to use this phrase, but I love it, which is, that businesses are vehicles for wealth, I would go try to find a different vehicle for that wealth, the way you can use the same skills that you’re developing to make whatever you need to make to feel comfortable, and then take a percentage of your time to do this other thing where your values and audience lineup as really more of a hobby, but as a hobby that you can afford because you’ve done something else. That’s how I would approach it.

Shawn (02:07:33):
Okay. This is a hard question, but an anonymous attendee, someone didn’t want to be known when they asked this question, I like this. All right, so the anonymous attendee asked, “How would you recommend a sell on initial product if they haven’t created an audience yet?” I would recommend that you go through part two of the audience and offer masterclass and I will answer that question in detail. All right, next question. Good economics is… Not necessarily, I read this earlier when you were talking. What else is there?

Shawn (02:08:00):
Economics is… I read this earlier when you were talking, André. This is a wonderful one that we really need to answer. If good economics is just breaking even with paid traffic, getting new customers for free. What happens if I only offer one particular service or product? In my case, I have a school that focuses on preparing students for one particular exam to get a certification. Once they get it, I can’t sell them anything else. In that case, wouldn’t it make sense to spend money on traffic… Okay, it wouldn’t make sense for me to spend money on traffic if the customer that I acquire doesn’t leave me profit. Or am I missing something?

Shawn (02:08:34):
You’re not missing it. You’re meant… Well, no, you’re not missing anything. You just need to use a different metric which is return on ad spend, which I’m going to add to the appropriate module so we all understand that.

Shawn (02:08:43):
ROAS is used primarily for eCommerce. Your business is really an eCommerce business is the lens through which you can think about it. Even if you sold a service or a digital training, it’s still eCommerce. It’s a one off. You are getting… You’re getting a customer to make a sale, not making a sale to get a customer. So the economics have to be different. Now whether or not you can use paid traffic is a question of how much your product costs and how much it costs to acquire a customer. So if your certification or your exam, whatever it is, if it’s $100 and it cost you $100 to get that customer, don’t waste your time because it’s just no value to you, unless you’ve made a mistake in your thinking in this second paragraph.

Shawn (02:09:27):
Once they get it, I can’t sell them anything else. Isn’t that true? I don’t know your business, but does that certification prepare them for something where there’s another need that you could work? And I don’t know the answer this, maybe it’s not. And if it’s not return on ad spend is your metric. If it is, if there is a chance in a way to find out if there is a chance is take a step back, look at what all your audience does after they get that certification. Ask them if there are any other needs that they need help with, is there something they need to do next? Just do all that. And if the answer is no, okay you have your answer. But if the answer is, “Oh well now that I have this, I really wish that I could do X” or “My next challenge is Y.” Guess what, you’ve got a great business. Just keep solving your audience’s problems for the next three or four decades and that’s to hell of a way to do business. [crosstalk 02:10:19]

André (02:10:19):
I think there are very, very few businesses there where you can only sell one thing, literally any sell one thing and there’s nothing else that you can possibly give that audience within that same category. And this probably is something else. Maybe it’s a tuition over the phone away I can coaching, I don’t know where you jump on scarp and you help somebody through some issues and you charge whatever for that. So now you’re getting potential customers for free. Can you build a business on that if everything else is break even, I don’t know. But there’s probably other stuff to sell I would have thought.

Shawn (02:11:04):
Yeah. Once you go looking for it, you’ll find that you can have a small audience and just be really good at anticipating or reacting to their needs and off you go. I mean its products reveal themselves in the second part of the audience and offer masterclass is really going to go into how to do that. So that’s my other answer.

Shawn (02:11:26):
All right, next question. How relevant is the model stating that? Hold on, I’ve just lost it. How relevant is a modern statement? 80% of the revenue from customers coming between months, three 18 free commerce in other markets, for example, non-English speaking markets, national European markets. Where can we find statistics about this? I don’t know where you can find those statistics. I don’t know if Dean Jackson, who is the person I heard that from, I know the way he described to me how he got the data was looking across a very broad group of his clients.

Shawn (02:11:58):
I don’t know where those clients were. So the short answer is, I don’t know. The broader answer is let’s look at our own buying behavior. So examples I’ve used a couple of times and things I’m writing. One is GORUCK, I became a GORUCK customer. I suspect profitably, by buying a backpack for $300, $295. Since then, I have purchased another backpack. I have purchased three other bags, have purchased a sandbag. I’ve purchased a couple of shirts, pants. So I did that probably over three plus months after I became a customer of GORUCK. So is that 85% of their revenue? Was that exactly how it breaks down for me? Maybe not. It’s probably more than that actually. So if you have a good product, good experience for people in the eCommerce environment and it’s not like a one off purchase where you only need to buy it once or it’s not a commodity purchase where, who cares where they get it kind of thing.

Shawn (02:13:11):
The other example I used is awaytravel.com. I bought myself something after seeing one of their ads, I bought something for myself and I then bought something for my wife and I’ve since bought something else again for myself. So that purchase was fairly recently. So once I became a customer it was a good product. If it’s a product that lends itself to buying more and they’re more options and they’re thinking about more ways for me to buy them, I would expect yes, that significantly more of your revenue will be later. However, for eCommerce, I would still use ROAS as the indicator, make money on every sale. Unless it’s like super inexpensive, then that’s hard. But in general for eCommerce, ROAS has as a better indicator and try to make four to eight times is really the range you want to be in as possible. If less than that, then you just have to figure out your economics.

Shawn (02:14:09):
All right. Next question. Module zero I talked about CPA cost per acquisition, cost per lead. Are the metrics the same? Absolutely not. Do each of these metrics have specific nuances? Absolutely. Yes. Cost per acquisition is the amount of money you spend to acquire a customer. Someone who has paid you money. Cost per lead is the amount of money that you have spent to get somebody to opt in to be on your email list. They do not have to have purchased. You can have, and I’ve worked with clients who have had lists in literally the mid to upper nearly a million people on them and they getting money out of those lists was like blood from a stone. Cost per lead independently of any of other factors is a meaningless metric. You can optimize for leads in the enormous direct response. Marketing companies often have, I mean their conversion rates are staggeringly low because they optimize for cost per lead.

Shawn (02:15:13):
How inexpensively can we get a lead, so I don’t like CPL as a metric at all. You can do some… You can make cost per lead a little more valuable. One of my friends, Jeremy Blossom at Straight Point media has kind of an interesting metric. They do high volume lead gen, they’re exceptionally good at it, but he has a metric called cost per quality lead and they have some other factors that go into that and then they build their system around optimizing for quality leads. So nuance, but the question here is some CPL CPA is the same, not at all. You can have a million leads and not a single customer and if you’re optimizing to tell your friends how big your list is, CPL is important. If you’re optimizing to put money in the bank and have the life that you want to lead, CPA is a lot more important. Getting people to buy is hard and know how much it costs you to get people to buy is a critical, absolutely critical. I just missed that fast. All right.

Shawn (02:16:21):
If a team works for the homework. Two modules, one module, one, two questions about direction, strategy, what answers… Wait I don’t understand let me read this to myself. So if a team works for the homework module one, two questions about direction and strategy. What answers should they choose? The execution guys answers, the managers answers, the owners? Oh, okay. All right. So the funny dynamics here, right? So who is the decision maker around direction and strategy? Right? So who gets to set in and that’s dependent on the client like you don’t… The decision maker is the decision maker. So if you’re the decision maker, excellent. If you are not, you’re kind of beholden to whoever the decision maker is. But the phrase I use a lot is, is the decision intellectually defensible? Is it right or is it wrong? We don’t know until we update it, but when we make a decision can we make the decision and what we describe out loud and why we’ve made the decision, is it defensible? This phrase came back from… For me really arose out of being in too many meetings where there are six or seven different things being discussed and then the decision makers said well we’re going to do it this way. Period. Or I think it’s going to be X or whatever it is and it was that’s great that you think that. But why do you think that? And they’re like, well I just think that this is, or this is the way it’s going to be. It’s like that’s not until… This is how to win friends not with clients.

Shawn (02:18:03):
Telling the person who’s the decision maker in the room that the way they just described something is not intellectually defensible, it’s not something I’m going to recommend to the client services module. You have to have a hell of a relationship with a client to do that, but everybody around the table answering these questions needs to be able to make the answer to the questions in ways that make sense. Not just, well I think it’s going to be X. I think the answer to your question. Anything on that, André, that you want to… If you understood it differently that I did?

André (02:18:34):
No no, I think that’s right. I can’t remember where… I’ve heard it a few times. It may have been Ray Dalio or somebody else who have said something similar with… When they’re in their round table meetings, everyone’s decision, including the big boss, the decision maker, they need to be able to justify why they’re picking a certain side. Yeah. But I don’t remember where it was from, but yeah, that’s exactly the way I’ll go.

Shawn (02:19:09):
Yeah, and there’s a really good conversation with Tim Ferriss and Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin was an elite chess player, incredible figure. He was the top of the subject for the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He talks about, I think it was Magnus Carlson, it was one of the great chess players to the greatest of the greats who would analyze his… He wrote a book about chess. Imagine that. And what he talked about is after every game, it wasn’t about whether he won the game or he lost the game.

Shawn (02:19:44):
He would go through his decision making about why did he choose to make the decisions that he made, regardless if he won or not. Because you can make bad decisions and still win against the inferior opponent. And this is critical for our thinking too. When we sit around a table and have a conversation about what initiatives we’re going to do or what we think about ourselves. The more we externalize why we’re making the decision, even if it’s just a little bolded list with pencil, like I think X is going to happen because of this, this, this and this, or whatever it is. And then when X happens, don’t just say, “Oh, I’m a genius. I was right.” Go check and see did it happen because of the way… And maybe you can’t find like you don’t know. It’s impossible.

Shawn (02:20:34):
Okay. I’m going to be honest I know it might sound crazy, but it’s not the outcome of our decision that’s as impactful as the decision making process that goes into making the decision. Because that’s where we have control over it. You can get lucky 10 times in a row and not realize we’re being lucky 10 times in a row and then all of a sudden the 11th time you lose it all because you’ve relied on a decision making model that was not sound. And this doesn’t have to be complicated. Just if you’re about to do with an AB test or whatever you’re about to do something, just take a position, I think X is going to happen because of Y. And the position might be stupid. I might do a headline test and say I think… Letter case is going to outperform sentence case because every time I’ve run this test in the past that’s been true. I go, okay, well that’s genius.

Shawn (02:21:29):
That’s not really what we’re getting here. We’re getting more at the, “I’m going to test this angle in an ad versus this one. And I think this one’s going to outperform because I think this is really the felt need of the audience, not this.” And then the data comes back and can confirm or disconfirm or maybe neither. Maybe you just don’t know. But just get into that habit of taking a position. Okay.

André (02:21:52):
So that’s a really important concept is to just internalize why something happened. Just go back and reflect on it and try and figure out, if at all possible. Tyler Cowen said something similar because he also plays chess. And regardless of if he won a game, he would go back and analyze because he knew that he had made some bad decisions and he was just lucky to have won, whatever the game was. And it’s the only way to improve, not through luck.

Shawn (02:22:27):
Right. Not the truth. All right, let’s see here. Now, one thing to add to that question though, that’s just really important. Everything that we do as is as, when I say we, I mean the collective, we, all of us who are in this endeavor and those who were in the same endeavor outside of this cohort, there is science, there is probability, there’s all of that. But there’s art too and there’s a lot of art. So what I just described is a very analytical process, rational way to approach things. But if, and I’m very sensitive to this, this phenomenon where people tell you something like its sort of canonical truth yet they don’t actually do it that way. So from a client perspective and sort of an analysis perspective and other things, what I just described you as how I approach things. But if I go back four or five weeks, whenever it was, when André and I first wrote that, the very first email on the Tuesday that went out, that began to discuss the traffic engine, we weren’t sitting around talking about the experiment for today’s email, right?

Shawn (02:23:42):
That was art. That the broad experiment in that was if I sit down every day and write something for tomorrow with all my heart and soul that I think is valuable and I give it to André and he does the same, we release that out into the world. We weren’t thinking like, okay, well what’s the rationale here for that? That’s just how we did it. And now if we got a bunch of feedback back then I was like, you two are idiots and what do you say? Well, okay, we might course correct. But because we took a position and we did it in the… and as we got feedback, that feedback suggested the position we took was the right one. But that wasn’t science.

Shawn (02:24:29):
That wasn’t analysis and statistics and so it’s not always that. And I can’t stress enough that even though we have all this data available to us and we can look at 12 different attribution models and confuse ourselves six ways from Sunday, that doesn’t mean that’s always how to make decisions. Sometimes the right decision to make is I believe in my heart of hearts that this is what’s most valuable to this audience and I am going to go down this road with all of my being and see what happens. Like sometimes that’s just the answer. Now if you get halfway down that road and everyone tells you you’re an idiot, okay, maybe course correct. Maybe you took it a little whatever. But if they tell you you’re an idiot in a Facebook comment, don’t worry about it. Because that’s a different problem and that doesn’t count.

Shawn (02:25:18):
Okay. In our business model to the eCommerce, they harvest important money at the first cell, the front end, and then they my double income client in 10 to 20 years from supplies. So consumables, presumably. Most of the products that are of this kind, should we use the eCommerce model or a direct response? I use eCommerce [inaudible 02:25:39] you have a continuity model. I mean, so you just know you’re doing, I mean you can… Love when I answer a question and I’m about to contradict myself.

Shawn (02:25:47):
I guess you can do both. So entertaining, right? This is true. I mean, I think the better answer is probably use both and see which one gives you the more actionable insights to use to make your business better. So ROAS is going to tell you that you made X amount of money on this first sale. It’s a piece of the information, but if you know that the lifetime value from continuity from consumables is significant, then you’re really less interested. So you might take a Forex increment and ROAS versus eight because you know you’re making all this money over time. So it’s just nuance. I mean I would just want to know, I would want to know lifetime value and I would want to know ROAS, and I wouldn’t want to just kind of see those things and then you just have a good picture of your business. I guess that’s my near final in that certain [inaudible 02:26:37] in my mind again.

Shawn (02:26:40):
Okay, this must have been disconnected. In this case, what can I do for better integration? Principle five launch right on. It must be disconnected for something that seems like it’s missing something. Do you understand that better than I do André?

André (02:26:59):
No, and I’ve deleted the first part of the question that…

Shawn (02:27:04):
All right we’ll just jump down to the next one. You can really ask that question if you want to and clarify. Where does YouTube fit in? It seems like it’s more like Facebook interruption model, but I wonder if it uses keywords like Google. I didn’t include YouTube in the traffic engine because it’s enough of its own thing and it’s different enough that I think it muddies the waters so I am going to do the right thing. Someone else asked us in the comments about YouTube and I’m going to put together a list of YouTube resources and just share that independently.

Shawn (02:27:35):
But this, the traffic engine is not YouTube and I don’t want to go down that road because I am scared of misleading people. It’s different. It’s different enough and I’m less knowledgeable about it. I shouldn’t be talking about it.

Shawn (02:27:48):
Okay. Curious about reconciling or synergies, what we personally want, optimize and business results and what we’re wanting to optimize for the user. As in a result experience of wanting to optimize for my clients is different from my personal goals from my business. So yeah, this is a fascinating question. So in an ideal world, more of this is actually, I think the answer to this Jared, is to go read Jim Collins work on the flywheel. You can buy, there’s a monograph which is an excerpt I believe from Good to Great, where he talked about the five little concept. I didn’t get it on Kindle, it’s just a little 50 page monograph. There’s a Jim Collins interview with Tim Ferris, and he really goes into detail about the flywheel, which is very profound, right? And it’s really easy to get wrong. And the thing to understand about the fly wheel when you look at those two resources you’d get it, is that each step of the fly wheel needs to lead invariably to the next. It’s not just… I’ve seen people use this concept wildly wrong and teach it wildly wrong. It’s just four things you do one after the other and it makes its result. It’s not what Jim Collins is talking about. He was talking about that. It’s four things that naturally lead to one another and they can’t but help to lead to one another and it’s that momentum created by that natural energy that creates the flywheel. So the way that fits into your question is if there’s something that you’re doing that you’re optimizing for yourself and it doesn’t lead invariably to the outcomes that your clients want or your customers want, that little bit of disconnect is going to create a little bit of friction in your flywheel.

Shawn (02:29:43):
And what I think you want to do instead is figure out… And it doesn’t mean do a different business, serve a different audience. It just means take a step back and figure out can you sequence things so that when you sequence them, you reduce the friction. So that what looks like it’s… It could be providing a different type of value, a different methodology of that and there are lots of ways to do it. But I think that framework is really going to help you answer this question because when it works, it should feel effortless. Like for me, my fly will have sort of spent some time thinking about this, a lot of time thinking about it. I got it wrong enough times that I think now that I have it right, it feels very right.

Shawn (02:30:24):
So for me, I am really, really curious and I like to learn. And because of that, I tend to consume a lot of information and when I consume a lot of information, at some point I want to understand it. And in order to understand it, I have to summarize it and make sense of it. And that leads me to… And I share it with other people. It’s sort of a natural thing that I do. And when I share that with other people, what happens is those other people are like, “Oh right, that reminds me of this, this, this, and this.” And that feeds my curiosity, which starts the whole thing over again. That’s why it’s a flyaway. That each step leads invariably. And if I do something different than that, it slows me down. But when I’m in that groove, life is good in my… What I produce is effortless and everything is better.

Shawn (02:31:17):
So that little bit of friction that you have identified is actually more friction than you can imagine when it’s compounded over the next however many decades of your career. So I would spend the time now to construct a mechanism, a conceptual mechanism in your life that when you are at your absolute best, is where… When you organize yourself that way is where you are producing the greatest value for your audience. And when you get those two things in sync, however you have to structure that, I think you’re going to find your results. Just hockey-stick. André, anything on that one?

André (02:31:58):
Yeah, I think the flywheel is an amazing resource and the best answer for that definitely get both. Get the monograph and then listen to the Ferris interview in any order I guess. I’m not sure one needs to come before the other, but consume them both and you’ll get enough depth to be able to then do it yourself.

Shawn (02:32:28):
Next question Steven. How does that apply in the context like dentistry, they help dentists attract consultations for high ticket treatments. So is it possible to optimize for buyers when a purchase is anywhere from six to nine? You can’t. So you’re in a lead gen business. I would do… And André and I have a mutual friend who’s in this space and there was phenomenal things with East does an assessment funnel and puts lots of questions into the assessment that indicate a strength of interest. And that’s really that’s the game, because you can’t optimize for purchase there. It’s too far. You can do some third party software offline event. But I don’t know that I would spend the time doing that.

Shawn (02:33:09):
I would spend more time increasing the quality of the lead by putting more hurdles in front of them. And I would try to figure out a way to cobble together a purchase optimization. So, okay. Jared, let’s see. Clarity. Oh this was on the previous thing that are not incompatible because he pointed, which, yes, I’ve answered that one already. I will [inaudible 02:33:33] that’s the answer. All right Tom. So is it more cost efficient to keep your attracting traffic on Facebook for the first layer, filtering, pre-sell, preframe for setting up on Facebook pages but then not chat bot, etcetera? Or is it cheaper to direct them away to an external medium?

Shawn (02:33:53):
So the answer is there’s a broader answer. It’s not a yes, no answer. So I think it is better and my experience suggests strongly that it is better to prequalify as much as possible in the Facebook ad. And it’s just a difference of approach. And this is really what the manifesto was about and it was really where the traffic engine came from, which is the old model of traffic was based on volume, which was get people away from the traffic medium, the traffic platform in this fast as possible to a landing page and let the landing page do the heavy lifting. And then that model is slightly different where it was get people out of the travel platform as quickly as possible to a squeeze page to get the lead and then sell them by email. Those are the sort of the old models and those models only worked because traffic was cheap.

Shawn (02:34:47):
Now traffic is not cheap, in fact traffic’s expensive. So rather than use that volume based approach, the filtering, especially on Facebook in my opinion, just by the nature of Facebook, the filtering happens more in that platform and is it because it’s within the platform? No. That to me is not really the thing here. What I mean I’m sure there’s some credibility around the fact that reading something within the confines of the Facebook as a brand entity. Sure. All of that’s probably true, but that’s not really what we care about. What we care about is that we’re having an honest conversation that is not trying to sell the clique. Now and I realize saying that probably a lot of you have stopped like “Wait a minute isn’t the entire job of the ad to sell the clique?” And I don’t believe it is anymore.

Shawn (02:35:39):
I believe the job of the ad is to as much to discourage the clique from low value traffic as it is to encourage… Not encourage to attract the clique from the right person. And that’s why we spend more time with longer copy really framing out an idea that they can consume the idea without leaving Facebook before giving us the signal that they’re interested in more instead of saying essentially, “Hey, can you believe so and so got a picture of her with such and such?” You know, click bait. That’s not the game we’re in. We really… From a conceptual perspective, a Facebook ad is holding up a sign. It just says just as much, don’t click here if any of the following is true as it does click here if the following is true, right? We’re not looking for a vacuum cleaner of sucking lead cliques and we’re really trying to distinguish.

Shawn (02:36:39):
So yeah, [inaudible 02:36:48] that’s specific to Facebook. It’s not true for ad-words, right? I mean it is, it’s sort of true and ad words and ad words is a different animal. Google ads, it’s a different animal now because that person’s looking for something. So yes, the ad needs to speak to what they’re looking for, but we don’t need them to spend three hours reading the ad and verifying that they might be interested because they have. The fact that they searched has shown that they’re interested and we just need to make it clear that they should be interested in us. So that’s the distinguishing characteristic there. Okay. Marco, let’s see. Marco, what do we have here? The topic is using brand positioning our ads to differentiate from competitors. In my opinion, Facebook ads are way more effective for that because the chance for long tax reveals and Google ads don’t work. Problem solution. What do I think?

Shawn (02:37:36):
I think you’re exactly right Marco. Yeah. I mean that Facebook is not… The GDN Google display network is more of a branding platform. There is a brand element in the credibility of a search ad. If you’re in the Inc.500 and that matters to people who search for what you have to offer, then put it as a call out in your ad that you’re in Inc.500. I mean sure that’s, that’s important. But Facebook… A Facebook rep told me recently what they really want Facebook to be more of, is a brand first, product later platform I think is how he described it. That establish who you are, spend some time establishing who you are and then engage with those audience about what you offer. And I mean that kind of makes sense.

Shawn (02:38:29):
I think you can do it in the same ad writing, but have authority and credibility in the ad in many different ways. So it can all happen in one ad. But I think that’s a good model. So long answer to a short question. I think you’re exactly right.

André (02:38:41):
I’m the wedge that you’ve been sucked up to you on Facebook ad questions.

Shawn (02:38:46):
Yeah, I know. I’m just the idiot. He said he wasn’t going to talk about Facebook ads and it’s answering 30 Facebook ad questions. That’s all right. Or [inaudible 02:38:55] hard time with that later. All right. Francis asks, how do these concepts and methods apply to brick and mortar businesses like plumbers, dental offices? You know this is a really good question because there are two answers to this question. And one sounds flip, but I don’t mean it to, but I’ll answer that one first, which is they really don’t.

Shawn (02:39:18):
And then the less flip answer is this sounds ridiculous now that I’m saying this, they kind of do. So here’s how they really don’t. I see this happen. I knew I’d entertain [inaudible 00:02:39:29]. So here, here’s what I see all too often. Somebody sells the latest and greatest how to build a funnel Wizbang you name it, webinar or whatever, and then they sell it to everybody. And then a plumber looks at it and is like, “Oh…” And because the plumber really doesn’t want to do more plumbing, right? Like in general, I could make money in other things, or the dental office or whatever seems thing. It’s not about that. They see this way to do it differently.

Shawn (02:40:01):
It’s not about that. They see this way to do it differently and they’re like, “Oh, okay.” So I’ll do a plumbing webinar and the person selling it to them, they say, “Can I sell this by webinar?” “Oh sure, you can sell anything by webinar.” Well come on, the last time somebody hired a plumber from a webinar was never. I’m sure somebody’s going to send me a messenger like, “Oh no, we did it.” But just go with me.

Shawn (02:40:27):
Some things they don’t really fit conceptually however, if you are a plumber… Dental offices are a little different because dental offices are often a little more like a direct response model then they want to let on. Massage, a little bit different but the most like a direct response model is a dental office because they have a front end product. The front end product is teeth cleaning. They have some midpoint need-based products, which are fillings and other stuff, and then they have an incredible back end of teeth whitening, implants, I mean, all kinds of high end stuff. So, dental offices are a little bit different.

Shawn (02:41:06):
But I think on the front end, when I say the frontline, on the front end of their business, it’s more needs-based. You go to the dentist because you have the need, usually for whatever that front end thing is, teeth cleaning and other stuff, or if you crack a tooth or whatever. So, that part’s a little bit different. But dental offices this applies to a lot. It’s one of the reasons there are so many specialties related to helping build your dental office and other things, or chiropractors and others. They’re subsets in that field that they’re more like direct response, they have a big group of service providers trying to approach them.

Shawn (02:41:44):
Plumbers and massage and other things like that, conceptually, you still need to understand, how do you acquire new customers? And you may acquire new customers entirely through word of mouth and if you have enough customers, check the box, you’re done, you’ve done it. A lot of plumbers get most of their customers because they work with contractors and they do the installation for contractors and the contractor is the horse they ride, and that works too.

Shawn (02:42:13):
Massage is a little different, people often search for massage therapists, also, word of mouth. So, yes the concepts apply broadly speaking but, no, don’t try to turn your massage therapy business into a direct response webinar funnel business, please. The world doesn’t need that. Okay, next question. André knows who I’m thinking about too, when I’m going with this particular question, that’s what’s making it so funny.

Shawn (02:42:45):
What tools do I use for tracking Google and Facebook Ads? We’re going to use Google Analytics and the interface, Google ad conversion tracking and Facebook Ad Pixel for conversion tracking. So, and when we get there, and I just talked about Facebook Ads a bit.

Shawn (02:43:03):
How do I test and optimize my system? Trying to look at it from a system perspective. So, do I look at total sales and move the tiny bits inside and see what happens? I don’t know if you’re asking me about my business system or about clients so I’ll do both quickly. There are two factors, keep in mind I’ve been doing this a long, long, long time. I didn’t have this, if you asked me this question 15 years ago, this is not the answer you were going to get. There was a lot of trial and error, mostly error. So I optimize my business now really, I over weight experience versus outcome.

Shawn (02:43:47):
I didn’t realize this until quite recently, I don’t really like money and that’s going to sound weird. And I do have some expensive habits like cars, but I am not money motivated and I don’t like looking at financial reports and I don’t like any of that. My relationship with money is a concept I borrowed from Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, which is, I don’t want money to be the reason I don’t do something. So, I’m into German automobiles, I could spend $160,000 on an R8, I’m not going to, but I also know that money’s not the reason I’m not going to do that. If I got a pile of money sitting around, I’m still not going to buy an R8. So, that’s how I approach money.

Shawn (02:44:40):
I over weight my system and I optimized my system primarily around the fact that I like to do interesting things with interesting people. So, I overvalue the opportunities to do that and as long as the money is on a level that’s not a problem, I’m perfectly okay and I don’t want to think about money. I’m not a money optimizer.

Shawn (02:45:01):
A client. So, how do I optimize? How do I actually do the work of optimization? The single greatest tool for me to do that is morning pages. I have written morning pages every day for over 40 years and I have learned more about, I cannot recommend morning pages more strongly. Do it. And then you decide to quit because it’s too hard, shut up and do it again and then just keep doing it because it’s the single greatest thing that you can do to figure out what matters to you and what really matters and how that’s important. That’s how I optimize my system, I let my subconscious reveal itself and I have these insights that I’m amazed by and I continually make my process a little bit better in that direction as I understand myself more.

Shawn (02:45:51):
From a client perspective, how do we optimize client’s systems? The biggest lever that I have with clients is getting them to understand what it is they’re actually trying to accomplish. And it is shocking to me how few people I’ve worked with over the years can tell me in 30 seconds or less what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Some can. I have a client owns a resort and the day one first meeting with that client. I said, “What, the basics about the business?” And he said, “The only thing you need to understand is that your job is to put heads in beds.” That’s it. That’s what makes this business work. If we don’t have heads in beds, nothing else matters. Perfect. That’s clarity. Most people can’t do that. The first thing that I do with clients is I ask them and get them to that perspective. And not all of them will do it.

Shawn (02:46:53):
I’m wondering if Warren is thinking of the same example. We had a client recently where it was just we were chasing butterflies, you just do a little bit of work in one direction then we’re work in another direction and it’s like, “What are we doing this for?” And the thing we thought we were doing it for wasn’t why we were doing it. So sometimes it’s hard to nail that down. But once you have that, all of the decisions are subordinated to that outcome.

Shawn (02:47:20):
And that’s the hardest thing to understand about systems theory because you’re like, “Well look over there, that thing is not doing, it could be better. That could be prettier, that could be whatever,” and if that’s not the thing that’s holding the whole system back, making it better, doesn’t make the system better and it’s just wasted effort.

Shawn (02:47:38):
So, it’s this ability to step back and see here’s what we’re optimizing for, here are the boundaries of the system, here’s everything where the effect comes from and then what are the big movers in there? What really makes this happen? With the resort client I mentioned before, the big mover was external to the system. When the weather is right and it snows and the ski areas are wildly attractive, then that external factor drives the internal system and I didn’t have control over that. We could just ride that wave. Long answer. What do you think? Any thoughts on this?

André (02:48:12):
I will say that anybody that hasn’t tried Morning Pages and does try it, they will almost certainly stop at some point, maybe early on and you just need to persist. Give it a break for a little while, but then go back to it. It is seriously the most amazing thing you can do. Yeah, so I don’t know how else to-

Shawn (02:48:38):
I just noticed a comment also in the chat. This is from Nick. Nick mentioned that, “He’s into German cars too, particularly those from shipyards. Nick is a Porsche enthusiast. He noticed,” he said, “It would be helpful to catalog the questions with a timestamp.” I believe we are adding a timestamp to the recording. Nick, I went to the Porsche factory last year and oh, wow, that was a mistake. Probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, ever. It was amazing.

Shawn (02:49:06):
Okay, next question we’ve got, we’re going to do eight more minutes of questions. We said two hours, we actually met three hours because we’re cool like that.

André (02:49:15):
We’re almost done now.

Shawn (02:49:17):
We’ll just make it through, maybe we’ll just do all of them. Who cares? Okay, another anonymous one. Maybe I’m a total greeny. We all are, don’t worry. I’m still trying to figure out how to see and know who has seen my pages. What do I use to do that? Google analytics? Yes.

Shawn (02:49:34):
I haven’t installed my website using Wix, but I don’t know how to use or read it. In setting up Facebook pixels, I’m not sure I’ve done it right. These are probably not things we’ll be covering in the course, but I will add resources for, I can certainly add resources for how to set up a Facebook Pixel when we get there. Which is module five, and certainly basics on Google Analytics. You’ll see me playing with Google Analytics and narrate, I used to train people on how to read Analytics so I’ll probably do some of that off-handed. How to set up goals in Analytics that gives you some nuance.

Shawn (02:50:11):
The problem with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t answer any questions. It’s just data. And data is just data, it’s meaningless. Data needs, you need to ask data a question to get some information and then from that information that you gathered, you eventually can get insights, that’s really the progression. Data, information, insights. So, when we’re playing around with Google Analytics and one of the reasons I’m doing my own offer, aside from being an idiot because it’s incredibly difficult, is so I can show you everything.

Shawn (02:50:46):
I can’t do that with a client, with the offer I can show you everything because it’s my offer. So, we can go into Analytics and I can show you how I’ve set it up and what the numbers that I’m looking at and there will be spectacular failures in there and you’ll see them and then we can talk about that. So, you’ll be fine, don’t worry about it. As long as Google Analytics is set up gathering data, that’s great, and when it’s time to have a Facebook Pixel, we’ll do that too.

Shawn (02:51:09):
Okay. Let’s see another, oh wait a minute I skipped one. This is from Bill, what’s up Bill? “In light of my experience with the focus group misidentifying a core customer, this customer’s a young athlete, 10 to 22 years old, but the buyer is the parent.” The buyer is your customer. “My stories are focused on player growth, emotional and physical and not parent selection. Is there a better way to draw them into their sphere? Are those two separate or intertwined?”

Shawn (02:51:38):
Okay. So, your buyer is not the young athlete, your buyer and customer is the parent. That’s a critical distinction. So, your stories about player growth don’t necessarily need to appeal to what the player wants. They need to appeal to what the parent wants for the player. I have an 18 year old daughter, I don’t think my daughter has a clue what she wants if every day for the last year is any indication. But I’m pretty clear about what I want for my daughter and I continue to make a lot of her buying decisions, certainly around education and other things.

Shawn (02:52:18):
If you were trying to, if I were your customer in that sense [inaudible 02:52:27] to training, whatever you’re offering, you have perceptions for what I want for my daughter. Now I’m not your avatar most likely. So if you’re a typical customer, sorry my internet just got weird. Okay. There we go. Sorry. If your typical customer is a hard driven screaming parent who’s there [inaudible 02:53:00] you’ve got to speak to that, but if not, if it’s the different, but just [inaudible 02:53:09] the short answer here is you should [inaudible 02:53:18] on behalf of, they want this sounds terrible, but it’s not really about the kid. Now the kid may go check it out. So, you might want it separate [inaudible 00:13:32]. All right.

Shawn (02:53:49):
Anonymous. I think [inaudible 02:53:53] courses versus eCourses? Recognizing it was asked before. This is an important question so Facebook ads, cold traffic-

André (02:54:05):
Shawn, your audio is terrible. You’re breaking in and out.

Shawn (02:54:12):
18,000. Weird. [inaudible 00:14:30].

André (02:54:29):
Nah, you probably need to put a few more quarters into the machine maybe.

Shawn (02:54:38):
Any better? Same? Yeah, I know. Apparently speaking of [inaudible 02:54:43] I don’t see anything [inaudible 02:54:49] jinx my internet here first.

André (02:54:51):
You sound like an awesome robot there. Luckily we were at the end of this. Okay. He’s going to log off and log back on again. One, two, three, four questions left.

André (02:55:18):
It’s pretty cool there too, three quarters of you guys have stayed for three hours. Yeah. I’m not sure if we’re going to get Shawn back now, but he hasn’t buzzed me separately. Maybe I’ll just have to start unmuting people and we can have a chat.

André (02:56:04):
Oh there we go, I think he’s back.

Shawn (02:56:12):
I’m back.

André (02:56:12):
Yes.

Shawn (02:56:13):
Better or worse? Okay. Sorry. I don’t know.

André (02:56:15):
Sounds good.

Shawn (02:56:17):
Questions and answers. I don’t see any open questions. That’s weird.

André (02:56:22):
Yeah, we got four there.

Shawn (02:56:24):
That’s strange, they haven’t popped up yet. I don’t see any chat or questions. Huh? I’m not seeing any of the questions. If you can read the question and I’ll fire off some crazy answer.

André (02:56:42):
I have to send it to you on WhatsApp.

Shawn (02:56:47):
Okay.

André (02:56:49):
Anonymous. I think it would be great to elaborate more on the LTV if you are mainly doing one, just one signature product course versus not adding too many new other products courses.

Shawn (02:57:07):
Okay that’s what I was answering before. You can sell, and the example I was giving is someone who has, its cold traffic, to a webinar, to an $18,000 course. You can do that, they make great money doing that. I’ve seen people do all manner of variations of that. I know somebody in the traffic engine had mentioned it by email I believe that, $2,000 offer, you can absolutely do that. You just need to know, you still should know all the parts.

Shawn (02:57:41):
You should still know the language of the discipline. The language of the discipline is CPA, LTV and AOV, those are the factors but if you, once you know that language and you can say, “Well CPA doesn’t really matter to me because, well it does. CPA matters, but my CPA is measured against this one product. So instead of being breakeven, it needs to be really real ROAs it needs to be my return on that ad spent. But you still, just because your model should be looked at through that lens doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know all the other lenses, and there aren’t a lot of them.

Shawn (02:58:19):
You need to be able to conceptualize this because you may find that your cold traffic to $2,000 offer its conversion starts to decline, you may want to look for different ways to get better conversion and you might want to put something on the front end that lets you get customers for free, so that you can build up interest over time. There are lots of ways, lots of reasons you might want this ability is really what it comes down to. So know it, but also know that one off offers are very, very common. Okay. I’m going to check WhatsApp here to see if there’s anything else.

André (02:58:59):
[Ameal’s 02:58:59] got one.

Shawn (02:59:01):
Okay. If you want to just read that, we’ll just go through them.

André (02:59:04):
When selling products, which are for family use, does it make any sense to try and guess who from the family is a decision maker?

Shawn (02:59:13):
Yes, and it’s usually the women. Women are, well this is true in the U.S. The data in the U.S., I had a client who sent me a book years ago, it was called She Buys or something like that, but the data, and I think it came out of Forrester, the data was pretty clear that buying decisions, this is for the United States. I don’t know if this is as true outside the U.S., but buying decisions are made primarily by women in the United States. Now your product may be different. Someone’s going to send me an email and say, “Bro, that’s not true. I do X, Y.” Okay, I get that.

Shawn (02:59:49):
But broadly speaking, consumer-based, whether it’s travel or other things in the United States, statistically speaking, you are more likely to be speaking to a woman, significantly more likely to be speaking to a woman for decision making. I’ve seen that across phenomenal number of clients, even with clients where the person they speak to initially is a man. The decision maker that is the final decision maker often in those situations is a woman. So, that’s just the nature of reality but the broader answer is yes. You want to speak as closely to the person who you know is going to be making the decision as possible if you can.

Shawn (03:00:30):
If you can’t figure it out, just don’t be, take a position, write to somebody. Always write to somebody. So if you think for whatever reason that the most likely buyer is a woman, speak to her in your copy. And if your copy doesn’t work and if things are going sideways, speak to him. See what happens. And if that doesn’t make an improvement, then you know it’s not gender. Of course there are ways to figure this out and it’s not always overt. I mean it’s not necessarily a different conversation, but still who you imagine in your mind that you’re speaking to has a tremendous influence on the copy that you’re creating, the words that you’re writing. So have somebody in mind and speak to that person.

André (03:01:15):
Do you want me to read the next one or do you have it up?

Shawn (03:01:25):
Did you put it in a Dropbox? Is that what I saw?

André (03:01:29):
No, WhatsApp. Yeah, Dropbox link, yeah.

Shawn (03:01:39):
Okay, got you. I can see it here. I should probably put my glasses on, nobody can see my reading glasses so it doesn’t matter. 49 years old in case somebody didn’t hear André. All right, George, “Using the principles of riding healthy horses, the staff,”… Oh gosh, this is from, I was like, “What is he? That’s a weird product.” This is from the coaching ones, so George, I’m going to save this question for the call specific for the client services one just because I think it’ll be valuable, we can go deep on that one. And last question it looks like, “Latin America is a market with a mentality of make money now. I want to build a business focus on customers with a different mindset or longterm business. My biggest problem is tracking those customers with ads. What points should I improve in my campaign to generate higher quality leads?”

Shawn (03:02:34):
The first question I would ask yourself is, “Do you really want to fight against that trend?” If the market that you’re in, the mentality of that market primarily is make money now, it will be much easier to sell make money now to that market. Now, if make money now isn’t the reality and that’s hard and it’s not going to work, or you know that they think they want make money now, but that’s not actually, whatever reason that’s not the right thing. It’s very difficult to meet somebody at the very beginning and say, “Hey, this thing that I know you want is wrong and what you really should want is this.” That’s hard.

Shawn (03:03:14):
What you need to do instead or what I would recommend you do instead is meet them where they are, acknowledge that you understand that, show empathy, repeat back to them that you know what they’re really interested in, and then start the journey from there.

Shawn (03:03:29):
Then bring them into your world from that starting point where you’re building on some trust from that empathy that you can say once you have a little bit of a relationship, you can begin to say that, “The challenge here is that we all want this thing. I wanted it. You want it, whatever. But it’s not that simple. Here’s why it’s not that simple. This, this and this, and let me explain this, this and this.” And then you take them on a little journey and that by the time you get farther along that journey, you have taken them from where they were, to where you want them to be.

Shawn (03:04:04):
It’s a little harder, but that rapport is worth it and it’s worth doing that if the predominant vibe in your market is something that you need to work in your favor. It’s a Buckminster Fuller quote, “Use forces, don’t work against forces that use them.” Don’t try to work against an overarching mentality, it’s too hard. Recognize it and then show them a better way. And the people who don’t want the better way, they’ll go away, you’ll filter them out, but I think you’ll on balance capture far more people by showing that empathy. And by saying, “Listen, I get it. I want that too. And I wanted that too, I totally get it. But the challenge is, every time I tried to get that thing, it slipped out of my grasp. And it wasn’t until I figured out why and here’s why.” Now you have their attention. That’s such a beautiful model. It’s a much better approach than to say to somebody, “That thing that you think you want, you shouldn’t want that. That’s not the way you should do it.” Nobody likes that guy. Even if it’s true, that’s hard initially you have to build trust to have that conversation. So make the front end of your engagement with the client building that trust to then earn the ability to tell them, “Yeah, there’s a better way.”

Shawn (03:05:24):
Is that really the last question? Three minutes or three hours and eight minutes, easy day. I lost the chip we had here, except for three things, okay, good. No questions in there. Perfect. Anything to add, André, or did we do it? We checked the box on Q and A call number one or four and I think there are a couple for the client services one to.

André (03:05:47):
Yeah, so [inaudible 00:25:54]. Yeah, we still have more than half the people on, three hours in. So that’s a good signal.

Shawn (03:06:08):
Excellent. Excellent. Thank you everybody. Thanks André. Always a pleasure. Talk to you later.

André (03:06:11):
Take care everyone.