Throwback: Pricing, Positioning, and the Art of the Upsell | Ep 378

Because if you start with the $500, you can downsell the $500 or whatever, 29 times, whatever that is, $460 or whatever it is, that probably anchors really well and just say like, you're just not going to get the one-to-one component, but you're going to get all these other things. And I think that's actually fairly compelling. So today is a deep dive.

What's up, Sam? Hey, how's it going?

Good, man.

Great to meet you. Thanks for having me here. Really appreciate it.

Pleasure's mine. I'm coming in completely unknowledgeable and ignorant. So it's, we're going to derive these solutions in real time together. I know Kirby is an admin on your community. So we actually get a little bit more stats that we can pull up on the screen, which I think will be fun. With that being said, give everybody the 60 seconds. What's the community about? So let's just start that. What's the community about?

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, uh, the whole community is about teaching people to paint. So a lot of them are artists as in they paint like landscapes. That's, that's the thing that I like to do. Cool. I've been one, yeah, you know, been doing that on and off my whole life. But anyway, it's to help people improve their painting. So, you could be a complete beginner, or we've got a lot of experienced painters, but they've just hit roadblocks with their painting. And this is exactly what happened to me many years ago until I got a mentor. So, the aim of the group is to just help people to improve their painting so that they can start selling and making money from their art. Okay. 3 communities in total. So we've got the free community, um, I've got a high-ticket, um, art mentorship program, which is like an art accelerator, and then we've got the art school as well, which is the, uh, the monthly low-ticket group. Um, I do a live painting class there every week, and plus there's loads of, uh, painting tutorials.

Got it. What's the high ticket? What's the price?

Well, it all depends. There's not really so much of a set price. It depends on what you feel like. Well, no, not what I feel like. It depends on how long you want to work with me for. I recommend people like work with me for a year and I charge around $5,000 for that. So we not only help them with, we do a lot of painting. So it's like 2 painting classes a week and then—

Taking it one-on-one?

Yep, they get one-on-one with me as well. And a lot of the people in there, they, they, some of them just want to improve their painting skills and nothing else, but some of them want to actually like make, want to be able to make a career out their painting. So we also help them with, you know, building an audience on social media.

Yeah, at your price point of $5,000, if someone were to tell me, hey, you want to learn how to paint and it was $5,000, And you work with a guy for a year. That seems like a reasonable price. That doesn't seem like a, like, I know you have the element, some people want to paint so they can also sell their paintings. I understand that, but big picture, I don't think it doesn't sound like that's the primary hook. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Yeah. Yeah, probably.

Okay. So $29 a month community, that's for people getting in either learning to paint or, you know, trying to advance in their painting. And so for everyone listening. $29 is the middle, $5,000 a year is the top, and free is the bottom. Okay. So what's the delivery look like at, uh, like small, medium, large? So what does it look like for free? Just keep it as tight as you can because I want to dive in.

Uh, so the free community, you're getting some painting tutorial videos and videos. So they're longer than what you would get on YouTube. So I've got a YouTube channel as well.

Okay. I'm going to get into the advertising side in a second, but just tell me, so you have your free tutorials. What else are you doing there?

Well, I mean, yeah, it's mostly As in just in the group in general, as in like the runnings of the group, or as in just in terms of—

What deliverables does someone get for the free community?

They basically get a catalog of full painting tutorial videos.

That's fine, that's fine. Okay, $29, what do I get?

You get even more full painting tutorials, but you also get—

More? Even more?

You get a live weekly painting class and and the painting class I've been running it as courses, so like 8 to 10 week courses. So you could be—

You just upload them as modules that continue to add to it. Is that correct?

Yeah. So it's like I'm making the courses like live on Zoom and then adding them afterwards. But you could be a complete beginner having never painted in your life to just attending one of my courses and already having a load of knowledge by the end of it and being able to make a start, like a really good start with a solid foundation in your painting journey.

Got it. And then, and then the $5,000, they get one— how many one-on-ones do they get with you?

I haven't, I haven't set the number on one-on-ones. It's just been as and when people need help. So we do two painting classes a week. So it's a lot more intensive. But what I've found over the last year of doing this is there'll be periods of time where people might need a lot of help and I might have to do like a few one-on-one calls with them and then there'll be times where, you know, they, they won't need any help at that time. So I don't have a set number on the actual one-on-ones for me. And at this stage where I'm at, I kind of don't want to say, oh, you know, you can only have this amount of one-on-ones. I want— I'm trying to sort of tailor that side of it to what that particular client needs, if you see what I mean. And everyone's completely different, as— especially as I'm finding.

Understood. So you do it on demand or as an escalation? Right. They have an issue that you escalate them. That's fine. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I'm just saying back to you. So free group gets, so your YouTube is short videos. Your free group has long tutorials. Your $29 has more long tutorials plus one live class a week with lots of people on it. And then for 5, the $5,000, they get 2 classes a week, which significantly fewer people on it. And I'm guessing you're teaching cooler stuff, I don't know. Um, yeah, and then if they need help, you hop on with them one-on-one. Yeah, got it. And how are you selling— how are you selling people from 29 to 5K?

So what, what we do is, is I've got a few ways of, uh, gathering leads. So, uh, I give away a freebie, uh, on my YouTube channel, on my website, and Instagram.

Yeah.

And then we get them into the free community of— yeah, then, uh, we get conversations going in the DMs. So I've actually now got someone doing, uh, setting for me So I was doing it myself before. And then the aim is to get them on a discovery call. And, and then we see if they're a good fit. If, if they're not a good fit or they, we find out if they probably don't have the funds at that point in time, then we, we try and sell them on the, the art school.

The $29.

Yeah, the $29. Yep. And then if, if they, if they are a good fit, then they'll get them on a sales call with me. And then I see if they would like to join the Yeah, the art mentorship program, which is the Painter's Mastermind. So the Painter's Mastermind, it's their own private school group.

Heard. Yeah. So right now YouTube is your primary source of advertising?

Yep.

Okay.

Followed by my website.

So YouTube goes to website or YouTube goes to community?

YouTube goes to the sales landing page. So they all get, they all go to the same landing page, which we've built on Systeme.io.

Got it. So you have a little opt-in page, copy my blueprint for painting success. Cool. Then you have an image, get instant access to the blueprint for free. Got it. Valued at $97. I plan to start charging for it soon. Okay. Next step, just let me know if you're curious from a compliance perspective, adding a value where it's not justified isn't compliant. Just as a side note, uh, you could say like, I just, I like it's free for now. I'm planning on charging for soon and it probably will, it will probably do the same on a conversion. Uh, but it would probably be more compliant just as a side note. So, uh, then we put, is it name and then, uh, email? Okay. Get instant access. All of this I like. If I were to run a split test on this, I would add in 3 benefit-driven bullets and test it. Um, and I would put them below the button and I would, I would see how that does. Cause oftentimes, like I've just, like you, you've got, you've got your 80%, 90% on that. Like it's a pretty clean page. It's pretty straightforward. I would just test that one as just like an easy lift. Do you know what your conversion on that page is?

Uh, actually, you know what, I haven't checked it lately. Uh, let me just have a look.

While you look, confirm with me the rest of the journey. So YouTube goes to— or YouTube goes to the lander, lander, they opt in. Then I'm guessing you thank you, you know, thank you page, join the community, and you email them to join the free community. Is that correct?

Yep, that's right. And then also we get them into an email sequence. So I have a COO helping me. He's also called Sam. And, uh, he's created like an email sequence. So I think we've got like about 100, like 100 emails. So we, we, we basically, uh, got a load of my old emails because I always tried to send out value a lot of the time as well as what. So we're able to like repurpose those.

How big is the list?

Uh, it's well over 9,000, uh, email subscribers at the moment.

9K on the list. Great. Love that. All right. So YouTube, lander, follow-up, and thank you page goes to a free group. Great. Uh, when they join the free group, they fill out some sort of mini app. That's what you're saying. And then your guys hop on the phone with them and see if they're qualified. Does that sound right so far?

Yeah. Yeah. Through the, through the message in the, uh, in the DMs. Yeah.

Okay. So they go DM to phone. Got it. And then, uh, and then basically they have an A/B path, right? So path A, if you're qualified, you can talk to Sam. Uh, and if you're unqualified, are you trying to sell them into the annual for the $29 a month one?

Yeah, I try and do that. Yeah.

Okay, good. Because if you start with the $5,000, you can downsell the, the, um, the $500 or whatever, 29 times, whatever that at $460 or whatever it is that I think would probably, that probably anchors really well and just say like, you're just not going to get the one-on-one component, but you're going to get all these other things. And I think that's actually fairly compelling. Like if I wanted to make the $460 my primary offer, I would probably present it the same way you are because basically the $5,000 just becomes like, if you're a whale and you want to You really want to ball out and you want to have the personalized attention, you know, you can pay the $5,000, but the, but it's basically like the $460 is the core offer. Do you know what percentages go into each bucket of the people that you, uh, that your team talks to?

I don't actually.

Worth knowing, but okay, that's fine. So, and you've got, uh, was it like 300-ish in the, in the $29?

Yeah, there's, there's a load of people in there that have, that they did a one-time payment to start with. Yeah. When I started the school group, which was, yeah, it was in 2023 actually. Cool. At the time I was completely broke and I moved over from Patreon and I sold a load of like one-time, you know, lifetime access. So it got me back on my feet and it's led me to where I am today. So.

I love it. I love it. You're good. Okay. So now that I have a good lay of the land, What's the goal? What do you want to do?

My, well, my goal is to, uh, to carry on inspiring people to learn how to paint. Uh, what I'd like to be able to do with, with the, with the whole, what I'm doing now, the whole community, the school groups and everything is, is I'd like to be able to sort of, uh, build out a team, but I would like to also pivot in the long run to helping more artists to be able to make a living online from their art. And obviously, like, helping them to improve their painting is part of it. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things I feel like I am qualified to do is to, you know, like, help people, like, build an audience, make, like, digital products from their art. Like, I've sold painting tutorial videos as downloads from my website and ebooks and stuff. And then, and also, like, be able to show people how they could create their own like community, their school, own school community where they can have a, like a monthly membership.

That sounds like a totally different business.

Yeah.

So you have 3 communities and you teach people how to paint. So rather than teaching people how to teach people how to paint, I think sticking with teaching people how to paint for now is probably the right strategic move. So yeah, yeah.

At the moment. Yeah, definitely.

That being said, what's the goal with this business? Numbers are helpful because you're already making an impact. So I can't change anything about that. So what, yeah, basically you've got 20 people in your $5,000 thing. So that's $100,000 a year. And you've got 300-ish people at $29 a month. I know some of them are grandfathered from, from Patriot or whatever, from the one-time payment. Let's say half of those are new. Would you say that's fair?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

So you got 150 people paying $30 a month. Right. So you're looking at $4,500, $5,000 a month that comes in and recurring from the membership base.

Yeah.

Got it. So you're basically—

$4,500. Yeah.

Yeah. So you've got like $8K that comes in from the, from the, the top. I know it's because you're charging $5,000 at a time that it's lumpy. I get that. But average is $8K a month on the top and you're averaging like $4,500 per month on the bottom. All right.

Yeah. So you're looking at— Yeah, I was going to say, do you mean in terms of financial figures, what are my goals?

Yeah. Or if you were like, I want to get to 1,000, I mean, any of those would be fine.

Oh yeah. I mean, I have those goals. Like, you know, I want to get, I want to get my, I want to get that low ticket group. I want to get to like, you know, 10,000 subscribers or more. You know what, this is in some ways a bit, I've been having to work a lot on my mindset in the last couple of years and it's something that I think has really helped You know, that's really been what's holding me back, but thinking in bigger numbers for me as well is still uncomfortable, but you know, is it wrong to say, you know, I'd like to be pulling in $100K a month or more?

Nothing wrong with wanting to make more, but for now you're doing $13,000, $14,000 a month-ish somewhere in there.

Between the two groups. Yeah.

Yeah. Between the two.

Yeah.

Let's just say, you know, $30,000 is kind of like milestone one to double, double from where you're at. And then there's a triple from there that gets you to 100. So I think in doubles and triples oftentimes, just in terms of like, what do we need to do in order to have that happen? All right.

Yeah.

So, because the thing is, is it's, it's rare that one thing will turn out. I mean, if you find it, that's awesome. But a lot of times, like you'll get them from multiple doubles and triples. That's where like you get the big numbers. Okay. So now that I have an idea of, uh, of what's happening, one of the data points that's really important here that's missing is what percentage of people who go to the free group or the paid group and what close rates are on the phone for A or B?

I don't have solid metrics, but I spoke to my setter this morning. He reckons he's getting out of 15 people that he pitches a call to, only 2 are like actually jumping on a call. And one of the things he says he's noticed is that the artist kind of group is very different to say like a demographic of like, you know, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs. They're probably a little bit harder to get on a, on a call with, just the nature of artists in a way.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't subscribe too much to that. I'll bet you there's a messaging thing, just because like you want to talk about, you know, beliefs. Like that's probably not—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

That goes for everybody who's listening to this. Uh, like explaining why this isn't at you, Seb, but like for everybody, like explaining why your group doesn't make you money or doesn't want to buy your stuff. Like, yeah, not gonna serve you. Okay, so I agree. One out of— so 15 people join the free group, he DMs all of them. Now, is that when he gives you 15, turns into 2 calls, right?

No, no, so it's, it's as— no, so it would be way more. That is, is when, when the conversations got to the point of would it be helpful to jump on a call. Yeah, out of the 15 people that he gets to be able to like say that in the chat. Only 2, around 2 people are actually like jumping on a call basically.

Got it. How many people join to get to that? Like I'm trying to get conversion metrics here. So like, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I reckon we must be getting about at least 60 a week.

Okay.

Let me just check my metrics again.

60 per week. And then how many, well, we can reverse engineer this. So if you're getting 60 a week.

Oh no, actually more than that. So in the last week we've had 151.

Okay. In the last week.

Great. In the last week. Yeah.

So let's just say 150 is the last 7 days. Fine. That's 20-ish a day. And then he tries to start conversations with all of them, right? How many of them get to, like, I would, I would want to know how many respond because I don't know how many people respond, but I would, I would want to know how many respond, how many get to the, basically the offer.

I reckon at the moment we're probably getting about 2 or 3 a week, but it's, it's really, it's gone in waves basically. We've had, we had one day where he had like 5 calls booked in a day and we were like, right, let's see how we could do this so that we could do this every day. But then it's, it's really been— Yeah.

How much transparency do you have into like what he's doing, this guy, this setter? Because right now he's kind of like the choke point of the business because you got 20, you know, 20 leads a day. Think about like this, you got 20 leads a day that are coming in. And per day, how many appointments would you say happen per day?

Phone calls? When you say appointments, you mean messages that are sent?

No, people who like schedule a call.

Really, very, you know, probably about a couple, maybe not even that at the moment. I mean, he is new, but he is like all over it, if you say, I mean, he's actively messaging. So I believe totally in time, that's— that number is going to go.

Do you have any idea how many calls per week, if that's easier?

I reckon he's probably getting about 4 a week at the moment.

Calls like that he's taking, he's like calls taken is 4 per week. Does that sound right?

Yeah, just yeah, as an actual discovery calls booked. Yeah.

Yeah. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you. For being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and You can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap. Roadmap. Roadmap. Okay. So here's the cool part. Like I'll always keep asking as I go through this, cause then I'm looking for all the big, big lifts. That's a big one because that means that right now you're getting 3% of the people who are coming for free to get on a call. And I think that you might be like, if I'm looking at kind of standards, you could probably get to 10% buying. And so there's a huge amount of lift there. So that's, that's it. That's, and of the 4 that get on the call, do you know what percentage buy?

At least one. At least one. Well, I mean, it depends because, because, um, so I might— I'm doing the actual sales call. I mean, I, I closed someone last week for my high ticket, but then at the same time I also closed— well, I mean, I sold someone on an annual membership as well. So they didn't buy the high ticket, but they bought an annual membership.

You had two sales last week, one high ticket, one annual on the—

on the— yeah, and I'm pretty sure I only had two sales calls as well.

Okay, so that was a little, even, even a little bit less, right? So when he's setting though, he's setting for you. So he's setting via DMs. He's not taking a call. You're taking the call and then you downsell. You basically sort them.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So yeah, got it. So you closed 100% last week. What would you say your normal close rate is?

I reckon a good 25%.

And last week was just a good week though, because you closed 100% last week.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I, like, definitely if I, or when I get more calls.

Yeah.

Yeah. When I get more calls, I'll be able to get a lot more.

Yeah. So, okay. I'm going to bet that, like, I mean, there's a lot of things, like, I, I could go, I could go into the advertising side, but the thing is, is that like, if I find a massive win, then I will probably just focus almost all my attention on that. So there's one huge one here and we'll get to it, but okay, let me just, let me just quickly look at YouTube because that's where all your traffic's coming from. And then, uh, and then we'll go from there. So the vast majority of people are not buying the $29 thing on the page. 366 members. Can you look at conversions, uh, on that one for me?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

I've only been advertising the paid group in, in my free community and in my emails.

Got it. So you have, so you have 8 signups in the paid community that happened this last week and that just happened straight from people clicking from one to the other.

Yeah.

Minus maybe one, you sold one annual last week. So there's that. But besides that one, the other 7 came just kind of organically ascending themselves.

Yeah. From the, yeah, from either email or the free community. I, I haven't been advertising this group publicly on YouTube. I've just been advertising a freebie. So yeah, my conversion rate for last week was 2.69%.

Yeah. I'm less concerned about that right now because the traffic source is your free group. What are you doing to ascend people from the $29 group into the $5K?

So when I'm on the call, I pitch the $5K one first and—

Oh no, I'll ask the question differently. So you currently have people come to the free thing because that's what you push them to. Then your guy sorts them and if he sets them, he sets a call for you, you anchor at $5K, then you, if they say no, then you downsell annual. If they say no, then you downsell monthly. That's how it is right now. Got it. But last week into your $29 thing, just because you have this large community, the 3,600 or whatever, and the free community, you got 7 people who just went to the page and just chose to buy for $29.

Yeah.

What are you doing to talk to those 7 people?

Yeah, you're right. I haven't been doing a lot. I do at the end of my painting class ask if anyone wants help, art mentoring, or, you know, that's where I pitch the art mentorship program. At the end of my, my lives every week.

Live class.

Yeah. I, I, um, I mean, now that you said that, I could be doing a lot more in my Polish community.

We'll get there.

Yeah.

We'll get there.

There's actually a load of, there's actually a load of, um, those people that paid for the lifetime access that I could go and message. Yeah.

We got some stuff. We got some stuff.

I'm still learning here, man. This is like up until you.

You're doing great, man. Dude, you were, you're an artist. This wasn't the, this wasn't the job. It's fine. That's, uh, no, it wasn't.

I just, I never imagined, like, if you'd have asked me 10 years ago when I, when I first quit my job and I had no idea I was going to make it work, I had no idea I'd be doing this.

If it makes you feel better, I do this for a living. Uh, so don't worry about it. Okay. So, um, okay. Now let's go to the advertising and I'll bet you we can pick out some stuff there and then, uh, and then we'll go into the kind of the solutioning side.

All right. Yeah. Cool, man.

All right. Sweet. Okay. Can you go videos? Uh, recent?

Yeah.

You know how I'm going to do it. Okay. Recent. Okay. Good. Well, you get some good views, man. You get really good views relative to your subscribers. So that's good. So you're at 56K subscribers. You're getting, it looks like, call it 10K a video. It's really strong. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Really good.

I've been working on my, uh, titles and thumbnails. I, I, uh, yeah. Uh, you know, been getting help from like Harut and Kai. Who've been helping me in my YouTube videos.

So no, it's great. Let's, let's just click it. Okay. How to paint loose but realistic coastal scenes. All right, let's do it.

Struggling with stiff photographic landscapes that are just killing the life out of your paintings and also making them look flat. Well, in this video, I'm going to show you how you can loosen up your brushwork by using the paint medium gouache. And I'm going to be painting a coastal scene. Now, what is gouache paint? Well, basically, it's opaque watercolor, but you can get some really great results with it and some nice vibrant natural-looking colors. And I'd like to preface that I'm mainly an oil painter, but I do sometimes paint with gouache, and I've actually found that it's helped with my oil painting process and to loosen up my brushwork. Now, I've only been painting with gouache for a few years, and as I say, I mainly paint with Here.

So here's the, here's the good thing. You've got 3 things that are going well with the intro. We just need to add a couple. So you've got a, you've got a promise, right? And you actually hooked with pain. So if you're struggling with this thing, uh, I'm going to show you this thing. So that was like, you had those first 2. A little bit later, you got into like semi-proof, I think. And I think we can tighten the proof part up, which I'll explain in a second. There isn't a roadmap. And so I think that's, that's to me, that felt like the biggest thing that was missing because I'm looking at this video and it's however many minutes it was, but, you know, decent length. And as me trying to put my viewer hat on, I'm like, where am I going from here?

Okay.

So I want to know kind of like what the road, like what the road stops are. And so I think it might be useful for you to, you know, maybe if you have like a fountain pen or so, cause it's a little artistic or, you know, you'd know this better than me, but like, you have, you have your pain and your promise. Great. Proof I would pull way forward, which is like, I help thousands of people paint every day. And, you know, I've been painting for 20 years. Like, you want to get it really tight. Like, I would practice it. So it's like, my name's Sam. I have helped over 2,000 people paint their first painting. And I've helped people go from beginner to advanced. And in this video, I'm going to cover 6 things about gouache. And I wouldn't even mention the, like, I normally paint in oil because, like, you don't want to discredit yourself, right? Like, It's like, and so we're going to cover number 1, how to, how to frame the scene better. Number 2, how to, how to hold the brush in a way, uh, for 2 different styles. Number 3, you know what I'm, what I'm going at, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I think that's a great one. So I think lead with that roadmap, I think will make a big difference in, in, in video retention. And you want that to all be covered within the first like 15 seconds. We paused at 48 and we want all of that to be covered in, in 10. I'm okay with the fact that you're showing that you're painting. I would love it if it flipped to you for a second though. I think that might be helpful just because also long-term it's like we want to build your brand. Right. And so I think that might be kind of worthwhile.

Yeah.

On the thumbnails, you've been working with Kai and, you know, Kai's good. Um, but, uh, something I would consider is I, I would, I would consider having the, like, learn to paint these. So like, think about it like this. The benefits that you have inside of a thumbnail are going to be something around risk. So like, stop messing up, right? Something around risk, something around speed, right? Like do it faster, do it in less time. Maybe these are taking forever, do it in less time. Um, or do it easier, right?

Yeah.

And so I would, I would experiment. I would experiment, just run one, see, see how, how it does comparatively. And you should be able to turn on, I think it's turned on on all YouTube, but there's an A/B testing.

Um, yeah. Yeah. I've just found out about that. Yeah.

So I would, I would split, I would split test. No, no copy. Uh, because they are paintings is what your, your current thumbnails are. So I would, the 3 kind of concepts I would be looking at are pure plain painting. Number 1, plain painting with 3 words or less in terms of the words on the screen. Cause you don't want to take too much away from the painting, but you want it to be clear when you're actually reviewing your thumbnail. Uh, text it to yourself on your phone, cause that's going to be how small it is. And so what happens is a lot of people design thumbnails, design them on these big screens, but that's not how people consume them. So you want to, like, it's the easiest hack in the world. Just, just send yourself a text of the, of the icon and then you'll actually see how few words you can really put there where people can read them. And then, um, the third concept that I would test is actually just a picture of your face kind of maybe with a brush and then the paintings in the background. Uh, because then again, that's going to get you like you more exposure long-term rather than, because this looks like a faceless. YouTube channel. Yeah. Unless that was—

yeah. No, no, it's not at all. In fact, actually, my older videos had my face. I do like an intro and an outro. And then, you know, I realized I was spending like 2, 3 minutes doing an intro, by which time everyone's clicked off. So yeah, if you go to my earliest videos, yeah, back when my hair was long.

Now your hair is long. No, that's all good. Okay. So, so big picture, we need to double down on roadmap. You need to tighten up the time upfront, you need to know what your introduction is like you personally that you can frame for your proof. Ideally, ideally you want the proof to be relevant to the thing you're talking about. So one is I've helped thousands of painters. That's kind of one level of proof. But if you're like, I've helped thousands of painters paint gouache and it's one of the things that I enjoy doing in my free time or something like that, then now I have more relevance to the proof, right? You want it to be as relevant as possible. For example, just an idea, is you could also think about like, have you sold— I'm sure you've sold paintings before, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, um, I think even just saying like, and I've sold many paintings that are gouache, right? Because then it's like, not just— I'm not just like saying I'm good, like people have bought my paintings. And I think that, that kind of helps, uh, kind of bridge that gap. Okay, so that's, that's YouTube stuff. Can you, uh, Kirby, can you click in real quick to the, uh, video just so I can look at the description? Free landscape painting blueprint. Okay.

So yeah, so that's my call to action in the video. Yeah.

Okay. And do you do the, uh, do you integrate a CTA within the video?

Yeah, I, yeah, what I do is usually about like halfway or three-quarters through, then, then, uh, yeah, there it is.

Got it. Okay. Okay. So I'll say this, um, we found first third. Is, uh, cause you'll probably get twice as many people to see it.

Okay.

Cause you're, cause you've seen YouTube, you know, retention curves kind of drop slowly. Like you don't want to do it up front cause it's weird. You haven't done anything yet, but like at about a third, it's like you provided, you know, sufficient value that you can get, you can do take 20 seconds and just be like, by the way, if you like this, um, and the key part is that you went with the CTA. You want, again, you want to integrate it to something relevant that you just talked about. Right? Okay. So it's not just like a commercial, like you want to, you want to make it as real as basically you don't want even to feel like a commercial. You want it to just be really natural. Um, and inside the blueprint, what I would do, cause you're showing the, the, the digital.

Yeah.

I would do is I would print the blueprint out and I would flip to the page that corresponds to some technique or something that you're showing. And be like, so what I'm doing right here is actually on page 17 and show you opening and be like page 17 of this blueprint and you guys can have it. It's free. You can just click below the link. You'll get way more people who will choose to opt in if you start doing your integrating your CTAs like that. Kirby, let's go back to the, uh, yeah, that's a brilliant idea.

All right.

Let's see here. Scroll down in this tutorial. I show you, so you do custom descriptions, uh, for each of them.

Yeah. I'm, I've been using AI. I've been using AI. Yeah, I've been using that AI to come up with titles and hooks for my videos and descriptions as well.

That's fine. All right. Um, main website, blah, blah, blah. The rest of this stuff is, is whatever. You could do a, you could have a pinned comment, which, uh, you can do on every video. And ideally you want to do it right after you post it, because then you're, because if you're the creator, they're going to like yours the most and you can pin it. So. The reason I like pinned comments for YouTube CTAs is because if you change your descriptions in the future, which I'm a bit, I mass change all my descriptions at once. That's kind of how I do my stuff. So I feel like whatever I'm promoting, that's what's going to be in my description, but then the pinned comment won't change. So it's like, if you have stuff that's relevant to your video, I would just make it the pinned first comment. And then that way you can basically take the big wave of YouTube traffic and point it wherever you want. You know, when it's, when it's appropriate. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Next thing is, uh, there's a feature on YouTube now that two things. One is that there's in-video popups that you can now put in. And so I would put your lead magnet as a product that after you show it, it just stays in the bottom left corner so people can click it directly on the screen.

Okay.

And then secondarily, you can incorporate products underneath Underneath, right? And so I would at the very least do the first one is just have this, have the blueprint sitting right there.

And just leave it there for the rest of the video. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't— YouTube's— I mean, YouTube takes care of their audience. Like it's kind of, it's tucked away to the bottom left. Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, okay. So I would, yeah. So we'll do that as well. All right, great. So let's go back to your landing page because the thing is, is Do you have any metrics around this? You were pulling those up, so what are the metrics for this page?

Um, so my COO manages the— manages this, and I'm still, I'm still finding my way around the system, but unfortunately I can't. So for the free— yeah, the free landscape painting blueprint, in total we've got 4,822 people from that.

Okay, yeah, but what's the conversion rate?

Oh, as in conversion into the, into the free community?

No, no. How, well, I mean, that would be great too, but like how many clicks go to the page? How many of them opt in? How many of them go to the free community? Like that's the funnel basically leading to your free community.

Yeah. Okay. Uh, that I'm honestly not sure of. I'm, I'm not quite sure how to find that out.

Okay. Well, whatever the landing page software is, I promise you they have a conversion rate metric that you can find.

I can see how many emails were opened and total clicks. So it's like 65% and total clicks was 44%.

Okay, that's good. That's, that's fairly normal for like a welcome sequence. So you're not, you're not missing anything big there. I would want to know what the, what the conversion rate of the page is though, because that's where you're literally sending all your traffic there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

One of the other considerations I'd have for that landing page, I told you the 3 bullets underneath. One of the other things I would consider is, um, split test that because you have one image.

Yep.

One thing I would do is show like, show one image, but show like, uh, two, two behind it and above, two behind it and below. So there's five images. So just show some of the, some of the techniques and like open it up a little bit, you know what I mean? Rather than just the one image. And so I would test that out. And my second alternate would be you, like if people recognize you from The videos did your first, like you will for sure. If you add your face to the page, you will increase conversions. If they're coming from you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, cool. All right. So that's, that's conversion stuff. And I think all of those things could, could measurably improve the amount of traffic that you're, that you're getting. So let's, let's talk about, all right, good. So we have 15. So let's talk about the 3 big ones. Big hole. So we did all the YouTube stuff. We did some, some tiny tweak stuff, but these are, these are kind of going to be the 3, the 3 biggies. All right.

Yep.

So big thing number 1 is we have to improve your conversion on your free offer to call. And I'm actually, I'm going to say, I'm going to say these in order of priority. Priority number 1 is those 7 people per week that are, that are signing on that you're not talking to for $29 a month. They should get an onboarding call for free immediately included with that $29. So that's going to book you 7 more sales calls a week. Right now you're taking like 2. So like that can triple your business like that.

Yeah.

Okay. What we want to do is I'm sure you have some benefit for them subscribing to annual. Do they have some sort of bonus or thing that gets unlocked when they subscribe to annual? Yeah.

Usually I've been giving them a free coaching call with me, like free hour-long coaching call. Sure.

So I would, I would take. So take that, right? And every one of those $29 people, I would offer 1, 2 calls, whatever, in order for them to subscribe for the year. And I think, and if you wanted to, if you wanted to be crazy here, you give them a 1-month trial of your high end. If you want to make, like, if we want to get these people, they already paid $29. They already took their wallet out and said, I want to learn more. And so you say, how much more do you want to learn? Do you want more, you know, more time with me? Because here, think about like this. You're going to give them 1 or 2 calls, right? One-on-one. Each of those are basically sales opportunities. Like you're not closing, but you're building trust, right? If they also have the 2 live classes per week that are happening at the, at the, uh, $5,000 level, like they also have that, like you're basically using up the, the high-level one-on-ones figuratively as using the 2 onboarding calls or so the 2 follow-up calls as They just get a free month of that. Now, some of them might be like, well, shit, I want to keep doing this. In which case, then you can convert them in the back, downsell, you just get the annual. Cool. So that's still not a loss. Okay. So that's like immediate money number 1 that can triple. So that could take you maybe from like, if none of the tweaks, if you didn't do any change in tweaks to the YouTube and all the stuff we just went over, if you just did that, that could take you to like 30 or 40. Okay. That's just number 1. All right. Number 2, you're getting 4 out of 150 people who are joining the free thing to get on a call or less. Right? So we have to fix that.

So, yeah.

So what we need is, um, I'm assuming that he doesn't have, like, we need to sell the call. All right. And so, because right now it just sounds like, how serious are you? Do you want to talk to Sam? That's what it sounds like. I could be wrong, but that's what it sounds like the script looks like. So, and given these kinds of response rates, that's what I assume it is. So we need to give something like you gave them a lead magnet, which was the blueprint to get them here. We got to give them something else to get on the call. So I think within the free community, what you can do is you can say, hey, when you hop on the call, we're going to unlock half of the stuff in the free community. So half of it's locked, half of it's unlocked. And the reason we do that is because we want you, like, we want to show you the best place to start. And make this a better experience, whatever. Now you can bring that up to people after they say they have, you know, they have a pulse and a credit card or whatever, right? Like they answer the first couple qualifying questions. Then we say, cool, if you want to find out how to unlock that, we can do that for you.

Right.

And you can hop on a call. So that could take you from like 4 calls a week to like 20. Like that, that could have a very big lift.

So literally in the classroom, I'd have like a load of those modules, like totally locked.

Yeah.

Until they've gotten the call and then you can manually unlock each person. Wow. I never even thought that's brilliant. Sorry, man. This, as I say, I'm still, I'm still new to all this.

This is great. You're doing great. Okay. So number one is the really easy one to do. That'll take you almost no time, which is you just, we start hitting the $29 people, try to send them. Those are going to be the highest likelihood, warmest people because they were in your brief thing for a while, chose, elected on their own. To sign up. That's great. If we want to increase the likelihood that that happens though, I would put a little, the first, the first module that you have in there after you have your introduction, do, do a 5-video VSL. So video sales letter. So that basically part of their onboarding is to kind of go through and the 5-video VSL I've talked about in other stuff, but it's origin story. You had that mentor who taught you, like, that's a perfect story of like, You walk through the journey as though you were them. And then you say, now that I've been on the other side, I can show you what I found. Right.

Yeah. So this is for the $29 group.

This one, this is actually for free.

Oh, on the free group. Okay.

You can also do the same thing for the, for the $29 thing. So, because both of these are just going to be sales conversion things that were, there's just forever salespeople sitting there that some percentage of people are going to go there. And then that, that's video 1, video 2, 3, and 4 are going to be the, um, just basically the biggest obstacles that people struggle with for why they don't buy, but you're going to frame it as an educational thing. And then the fifth video is going to be basically an invitation to the next thing. And you'll mention again, whatever free stuff they get for the next thing in that fifth, that fifth thing, and put the link below for them to schedule a call. Where they schedule, you can have them fill out like on the actual scheduler, have them fill out their stuff and you can just choose to disqualify people if you want to.

All right. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And you can put that qualification in the video so that doesn't feel like you're just, you know, canceling people. You just say like, hey, you have to meet these qualifications to get here, whatever. Okay. Those are just like easy things that we can do to the existing communities to just push more people through. So back to the— so that— so we're starting with the 29, the 29 Ascensions. Great. We're going to add the VSL in. Cool. We're going to add that also into the free, the free group. You're going to add the lead magnet to the call, which is that half of these things are going to get unlocked if they get on the call. So you can get way more at-bats, uh, to book calls. All right. So the, the last thing that I want to hit on is you have these 9,000 people, right? If you want to, if you want to have like a big cash pop, you know what, I could get into that, but like, I kind of want you to just do this stuff. I think this is enough because we talked about a ton of stuff on YouTube that you, that you'll have to switch up. We have the free to paid. And then we have the paid to more paid. We have the stuff that you're going to be making inside of the community. We have the landing page split test that you're going to do. We have the new intros. Yeah, I think you've got, I think you've got work. So that should take you some time. But let's, let's sum it up though, because right now I think you could very well go from 5 out of the, sorry, 4 out of the 150 to like 20. Like that's a 5x. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

You've got, you've got a triple sitting on the $29 to $5K that you're not talking to the other 7 people every week who've already paid you. So you got a triple there. So putting those together, it's a 15X from where you're at. So that's your $100K per month. Like we can do that. You can do that right now. And then in terms of increasing the top of funnel, the 2 big levers that we have are improving the intros and thumbnails for YouTube, adding the pinned comments in. Right. Um, so that you have the CTA that's always sitting there when you're doing the integrated CTAs, actually print it out and show it to them. And then when they get to the landing page, they should also see your face and see some of the other images inside of it. And I would, I would bet that that would increase the, the close rates. And so, sorry, the opt-in rates. And so the last piece that I'll give you is this. You need to put tracking in place so that, you know, click all the way through. So basically. I'm going to say them quickly and you can watch this recording later.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You need to know how many clicks are coming from YouTube, number 1. So whatever clicks are going to that link, we need to see that. You can put a UTM parameter on it. If you've got some tech guy, he can do it for you. All right. So that's going to go to your landing page. We need to know the opt-in rate or the conversion rate of the people who are taking in the PDF. So we get that piece of data. Then we have percentage of people. That are coming straight from the thank you page. Okay. So right here, put a picture. So this thank you page, put a picture of your community, like your, your community landing page so that they know where they're going. Cause what it'll do is it's going to increase the opt-in rate of your community because they'll see where they're going. So it'll be more congruent of a customer journey for them.

Yeah.

That makes sense. So we're not going to see it here. You're just going to see a higher percentage opt-in on your community. Now, the next piece of data we need is two, because it's going to split, which is what percentage of people are clicking from emails and what percentage of people are clicking from here. Because that'll give you a good idea of like, okay, wow, most people are coming from the thank you page, not my emails. Okay, so I should focus on my thank you page more. Or, you know, everybody's coming from email over the long term. Maybe I need to make my emails better, whatever. Okay. The next metric that you're going to want is the conversion rate of the, of the free page. The free, you know, the free about page, your community. And then we want percentage of people who go basically through the funnel there, which is people who, uh, respond, people who book calls, people who show, and then people who close. Yep. That's what we want. Now, because you also have people who just choose to opt in straight for the $29, because they can just buy it on the page. I would just have a separate set of metrics that's just like what percentage of people who opt in for the $29 book a call, show, and buy. That make sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, cool. I feel like we can make a lot of money.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for this, Alex. I really appreciate it.

You bet, man. You bet. I appreciate being on Skool.

Awesome.

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