How To Create, Repurpose, Position & Organize Content To Attract Qualified Leads

At a young age, Jermaine Griggs founded his very first company and has grown it into Hear and Play Music. Now, Jermaine has won multiple awards, spoken on many stages for years, and in this episode, Dave D interviews Jermaine Griggs in order to discover how to correctly use content to attract qualified leads. Hey there, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. We are so excited to have you here. Jermaine Griggs in this episode is going to go in serious organ Organize Depth and give you 7 unique steps that you can use in order to create, repurpose, position, and organize your content in order to attract new qualified leads, build rapport, and build your customer base. Now, Jermaine Griggs created an online company that has done extremely well, but the lessons that you'll be able to extract from this episode will help any business grow., and I cannot wait for you to get started. Let's listen in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hey everybody, this is Dave D from GKIC, and welcome to this list building school call. I am really stoked about this call because at the end of this session, you are going to learn how to create, repurpose, position, and organize content to attract new qualified leads, build rapport, ultimately your customer base. We have the best of the best on with us for content marketing. His name is Jermaine Griggs. You may not have heard of Jermaine before because he's actually not really a guru. He's actually out there doing it with his own business. His story is really absolutely amazing. As a 17-year-old kid, he scraped together $70 and started an online music school while living in his grandmother's one-bedroom inner city apartment. Today, Jermaine's HearAndPlay.com is a 7-figure online business. Now check out these numbers: driven by 27% click-through rates, landing page conversions surpassing 12%, and open rates as high as 42% to follow-up email campaigns. Most folks don't do their content marketing correct. Jermaine does it. He knows how to do it and more importantly knows how to teach it, so let's get started right away. Jermaine, thanks for joining us on the call today. We really appreciate it.

Hey Dave, I'm happy to be here.

Dude, you've been at this for a long time. I remember like way back to the Corey Rudl days, I was, I was reading about you.

Absolutely. In fact, I think that was 2001, and that would have made me around 18 years old when I ran into Corey. But really, the story starts 10 years before that teaching kids how to play the piano in my neighborhood, playing for my church. Grandma won this piano off The Price Is Right in the '70s, and I hear—

Is that true? She won it off The Price Is Right?

That's very true. I owe Bob Barker, you know, part of my success, because this piano is like a family emblem. It's like 40 years old to this day. It's still at my mom's house, and this was the piano my grandma would play, and as a kid, I'd just admire her playing it, and I'd go get the pots and pans and beat on them, and eventually, I'd hop on the piano and noticed a knack for doing it myself, like hearing chords and just hearing the natural songs and playing Disney and Beauty and the Beast and Under the Sea and all these songs I would hear my sister listening to. And one thing led to another, and here I am now playing in church as an 11, 12-year-old, and then parents saying, hey, can you teach my kids how to do that? And here I am with a MIDI music business in my teens, and that's what eventually led me to launching Hear and Play. The date was like August 6th, 2000 to be exact. We're going on our 15-year birthday coming up.

Wow, that's incredible. So what we're going to be talking about is you really laid out a literal step-by-step system for how to use content marketing. So, Jermaine, you say the first step is data collection, data collection. And you're not talking about collecting the names and email addresses of to get people opted into your list, but rather what are you talking about?

I'm talking about collecting data on what keeps them up at night. What's their single biggest frustration? What's their question about what you do? Oftentimes we'll have one thing in our heads and we'll go with that, but we forsake going to our market, our audience, and figuring out what is it that they want. So we use tools like SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo to basically go to our existing list if you have one, and we'll talk about if you don't have an existing list. But you go to your existing list of prospects and customers and you ask this simple question. You say, what's your single biggest question about— and for me, playing the piano— or what's your single biggest question about improving your speed and accuracy on the piano, or what's your single biggest question about improving your golf swing, what's your single biggest question about slashing your tax bill this year, or growing your chiropractic or dental practice. You go with that, and depending on the size of your list, this could potentially gift you with a treasure chest of ideas for months to come. And depending on the tool, like SurveyMonkey, SurveyMonkey gives you analytical tools. So this isn't just using your web form creator, Infusionsoft or AWeber, because you're not going to have the analytical tools to then sift through that data and see where the trends and the patterns, and it'll make certain words bigger than others. So when you see how people are using this specific phrase or word to describe the problem. It's not just enough for you to know it, but you have to be able to speak their language, message to market match. And so I'm a big advocate of using SurveyMonkey for this first data collection step.

Now, so what you're talking about here is emailing your own list, asking people on your own list what they're looking for, correct?

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the first step. So you drive traffic to this SurveyMonkey and you can start with that single question, but as we'll talk about in the next step, you can ask a few additional pieces of demographic and psychographic information as well. Getting into, for example, I might ask them their single biggest question about playing gospel piano or playing in the church or what have you, as that's one of our other genres. But then I'll ask gender. I may ask age, and I may ask skill level, because then I'm able to filter, and there's this cross-filter functionality in most survey management software where I can say, give me everybody who's a beginner because hey, I might find some gold or some gems in there specifically for them. And that's where segmentation, being able to split people up by whatever their key— you'll find key sects in your markets, key groups. For me, for example, in music it might break up by style. It might be jazz versus salsa or Latin gospel or classic or pop, or it may be beginner skill level, beginner, intermediate, advanced. So those are some additional pieces of information you may want to ask to break them out. But yeah, it starts with the single biggest question: what keeps you up? What's your frustration? And you'll find, you'll find some wisdom from these responses, and that's what you'll lead with, with your lead magnet. And we'll talk about that soon.

Yeah, so what you're taught where this is all leading is coming up with a lead magnet or lead magnets and that solve the problem that your prospect really wants. Most of the time we're kind of just guessing, right? Unless we do the survey and ask the actual people, we don't really know. We're just kind of guessing, but when it's there and it's right there in the survey and they're telling you what they want, it makes it a little bit easier. Jermaine, the big question I think people are having is, okay, they say, yeah, okay, I got it. That's great if you have a list.— let's say I don't have a list and I need to build my list. What would I do in that case? How do I get these survey results?

[Speaker:ADRIAN WILSON] Right. You'd be surprised, you know, for people with no list and lists alike, Facebook. Now Facebook is a powerful tool to really find who you're looking for down to not just gender and demographic stuff. That's a given on Facebook, but down to their psychographic, what they're interested in, why, organizations, publications. You can really say, who am I? You know, you make your— and I know you guys have other classes on your customer avatar, and you can really drill down on that on Facebook. And for $5 a day, for the people out there that have been afraid of Facebook or paid traffic and you're trying to figure this all out for free, no, $5 a day, you know, 10 cents a click, you could have 50 and even less than that in some instances, 50 to 100 visitors at your website with a decent conversion rate of people filling out your surveys, and you can start collecting data No list. And truth be told, there's nothing stopping you from adding email to that biggest question if you wanted to. This does not have to be an anonymous survey. Now anonymous will work better than email, but you can connect these things together. You can offer a bribe. You can say, hey, we're at our beginning phase with collecting this information to put into an eBook, but if you actually contribute to this, I'll give you the product for free, the eBook for free on the other end of it. So hey, put in your email "Email if you want that. If you don't, hey, leave it blank." So you can actually begin collecting a list in the research phase all at the same time. So with Facebook and as little as $5 a day, and like I said, offering a free gift or bribe in exchange for their single biggest question, and cold traffic, this works. Like even back in the day, they used to call this a fly catcher page. You remember that, right, Dave? Absolutely. Yeah, this isn't anything new.

With Facebook now, you have an easier way to really get to that target group. Fantastic. What we've learned here so far, that by the way, that's just step 1, and he broke it apart into 2 phases here. One is to ask the very simple question of, "What's the biggest question you have about blank?" Then you can go even a little bit more depth and add some demographic, psychographic fields so you're getting more information from your customer. That is if you have your own list. If you don't have your own list, then what you're going to do as he mentioned is go on Facebook, do a very, very cheap, very inexpensive ad buy and drive traffic to a survey to get this information. Those are your first 2 steps. Everyone's covered. Whether you have a list or you don't have a list, you're covered here. Let's go to step number 2, Jermaine, which is then what you say is, okay, I've done this survey and now I see in my SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo, whatever I'm using, that there's some themes and some topics that more people are asking about. They really stand out. So a whole bunch of people are asking about this certain topic. What should we do next? Absolutely.

So the difference in step 1, step 1 is collecting the data. Step 2 is as simple as using the data. And you would think that that was obvious, but I've got surveys from the past 10 years just sitting there that we collected. We got excited about the data collection process and didn't even go back to, sift through it and use it and filter it out and convert those responses into actionable items to use. So step 2 is going through, analyzing, and filtering those responses, and determining the commonly mentioned topics. And like I said, SurveyMonkey and Gizmo will have word clouds similar to how WordPress, you know, certain— you go to WordPress pages, especially in the past, and certain words would be bigger because the topics on that website use that phrase more than other phrases, for example. Well, in the same way, you'll be able to look at a word cloud and see the phrases used, click on it, and be able to go to those responses. Well, certain responses are going to stand out. For me, for example, I thought it was all about playing clean and fast, and we need products on being able to play clean, fast, high tempos, and things like that. And when I found out, because we cater to musicians who don't read sheet music, it's playing by ear, the biggest problem that they had was finding the key key of the song. And yes, your business may be different, but think about that starting thing. I remember Bill Glazer, he said something like, this is the number one skill you need as marketers. And I forgot what it was, but for me in music, finding the key is the number one skill. And guess how I found that? I mean, it was something I took for granted. I found that through surveying. People are like, I can't find the key of the song. If I don't know if it's in F major, and I can't make light of it if I don't have sheet music in front of me. Guess what my first video is when you come to one of my lead magnets? We call them lead magnets or lead carrots. It's finding the key of a song. Now you take this a step further by figuring out all the different topics that stand out like this. I have a client, Ramit Sethi. You may have heard of him, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Yeah, this guy has— I'm flabbergasted. This guy has 300 lead magnets. He's taken this concept and strategy to heart. He's surveyed and he's come up and he's in the career and financial financial help and that kind of— here's how to better your life financially. He's got all kinds of— he's got cheat guides and he's got video series and he's got ebooks. No one says that you have to keep it in one modality, so this is about opening up your mind and getting your creative juices going. Oftentimes what they tell you will lead you to other ideas that you didn't have before. That's step 2, and what you do, you don't stay there. You convert them to headlines immediately. Jim Rohn would say, start with the end in mind. I think that many people separate the research and then the marketing copywriting process. Those come sequentially one after the other. I start with the copywriting even before I have my lead magnets created, because I want to create the headlines that sound so good that I have to live up to that headline. I've got maybe 5 or 6 6 formulas that have been proven to work. These aren't new. You can date these back to John Caples' Tested Advertising Methods, 1925. But examples would be, X ways to, and again, insert your dominant benefit there. X ways to improve your speed and accuracy on the piano in 2 weeks flat or 1 week flat. X mistakes. This is the difference between pleasure and fear. Tony Robbins would tell you people are more into avoiding mistakes and fear pain rather than moving towards pleasure. So you can always go with the X mistake, 7 mistakes most beginning golfers make when trying to get their swing right, and you know, something like that.

How—

just a simple how-to, you know, how-to. You can come up with a number of topics just with that. How to save money on your taxes this year, how to slash your tax bill in half, obviously within reason. I don't know the tax code and all that, but you know, they say stay legal with your headline. "What you must," and then there's a behavior. This is the next one. "What you must blank in order to," and then whatever the dominant benefit from. These are formulas. All you have to do is plug in your stuff. What's the behavior your niche, your market has to do, and then what's the benefit on the other end? Again, this will come from the data that you've collected. Then the last one on my list, "What you must absolutely know about," Playing the piano by ear, playing the piano in church, playing jazz scales, improvising on the piano, playing for weddings, X or X things you absolutely must know about. Those are my formulas. So immediately we're taking the key results and the more popular ones that come in and we're converting them into multiple headlines. That way when we go to create our landing pages and our opt-in pages, which by the way are easier than ever before these days, and we'll talk about that, We've already got our headlines created. If anything, like I said, I got to live up to the headline when I then go to create the content.

Right. Yeah, exactly. I love that strategy. You get the survey results, you see the hot topics, and then you immediately turn it into a headline because you're going to have to do it anyway. Why not turn it into a headline right away? One of the things that you talk about under this step, and you have it as a step 2C, is don't be afraid to give your best material. I think a lot of people disagree with that. There's some controversy about that. What is your take on that about really giving good value upfront?

[Speaker:ADRIAN WILSON] Right, and like I said, I said this on another call, you'll find people on both sides of the aisle, but I'm that moving the free line guy. I'm the freemium. I don't mind giving my best stuff, and I think it comes down to mindset, abundance versus scarcity, and there are some times and places to draw that line. But for me, I'll give away my best stuff. I have a course on finding the key of a song. It's an 80-minute audio course, but I'll also— heck, I'll do a 30-minute lesson that pretty much at the end— if you go to my YouTube, this one video has like 300,000 views, like 1,000 comments, people saying, wow, you promised me in the first minute that by the end I will be picking out the keys to songs, and you tested us on 7 songs at the end, and I was able to do— I was able to do all 7. I was able to do 5 of 7. Like, these are real testimonials. They didn't pay me a dime. So Frank Kern would call it results in advance. When you can deliver, and you can deliver without a, you know, a commitment, a financial commitment on their end, just they've given you email and name and you can deliver and build rapport, that relationship starts off in such a way that in the backend, I'm telling you, they've lowered their guards. And so for their first purchase and their follow-up purchases on down the line, I've noticed a clear difference in just people who get on my list, and there is that there's no preview to Jermaine Griggs' world or Hear and Play world. There's a clear difference, and I think the fallacy is in the tracking, right? People track cost per lead or cost per first conversion, but the true value, if you get into database marketing and lifetime value, the true value is what are they worth 6 months down the road, a year down the road, 18 months down the road? And that'll drive your overall strategy more than short-term decisions and, ah, no, I can't give them And oftentimes what I'm giving away is just a small chunk out of the bigger picture or what we're driving them to buy ahead. So yes, my first video sequence, it's 4 videos, add up to about 2 hours. To be honest with you, Dave, that's 2 hours. That's a real course in my world, but it's absolutely free.

Yeah, and, and, you know, I'm on the same wavelength as you. I mean, I think that the content needs to be created in such a way that, you know, it does move the sale forward. I think that's where a lot of people miss it. However, you're totally right. People will still buy the— your product. In fact, to give you a really good example of it, so at GKIC, one of the things that we do to create product is do something called the micro launch. And so this year we did a number of these, 3 or 4 of these where we're actually creating the product live. People can tune in on the internet and watch Dan and I create the entire product. Then at the breaks we have a little VSL that goes up, video sales letter that goes up and says, "Listen, if you want to buy this thing that you're watching, here's a special price on it. You can get it." Guess what? A whole bunch of people who are watching the thing being created, all of the content, still go ahead and buy it. So it absolutely does work. It's a really, really great strategy.

[Speaker:ADRIAN WILSON] Absolutely, Dave, and people would think it's counterintuitive, but there's a company right now, I think they've gotten $50 million in the whole Silicon Valley VC world, but it's called creativelive.com, creativelive.com, and they cater to photographers, videographers, artists, that creative artsy world, but teaching them how to grow their business and how to get better shots and how to do this.. And it's the same model you just described. Like right now, there's probably 5 channels on their website that you can tune in live. There's a button in the lower left-hand corner that says buy this course for $59, or sometimes it's like buy this course for $199. And there are some additional things you get. You get study guides and exercises and breakout tutorials. But for the most part, every course that they sell— and this is an 8-figure company, and they've got $50 million at least behind them, and very, you know, substantial VC firms and things like that that are putting their money where their mouth is on this model here. So there's something to be said about that, and in 2015 we'll be moving to that. We haven't created a product live yet, you know, live. We create products but not live. But yeah, I'm for it, absolutely. And, and this is what has driven not only our mailing list to over 300,000 musicians in my Infusionsoft account, 200,000 musicians in my one shopping cart. We've got half a million people that we cater to. And every one of them came in where we've over-delivered on free content, and they feel like they know me. That's the thing. When they call the office and we've got voice broadcast going out, they really call back asking for Jermaine after getting a text message from me or voice broadcast. And the saddest thing is having to say, "Oh, he's not here right now." But that's the kind of relationship that you get when you give first. And it will come back to you. Now, that's not to say to wish and hope. This isn't the hope factor. We are using direct response, and we are making an offer, because Grandma would say, if it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense. So this is certainly not a hope and pray. You know, there is a follow-up process that ensues after that.

Perfect. So now we'll move on to step number 3. So we've created our certain— we've created our headlines and all that stuff. Now we actually have You have to create the actual content. This is one of my favorite steps of yours because what you say is when you create the content, when you produce the content, you want to use different modalities. Can you explain that in detail? Everyone, please listen very carefully to what he's about to say because it's extremely powerful.

Absolutely. If you haven't figured out, I like to do— I like leverage, and even when I was 17 years teaching these neighborhood kids. That's how my first product came about, a workbook. I was like, I'm tired of teaching them the same thing every week. I've got 8 students. I got to cover the same— I'm going to put this in a workbook. I'm going to leverage what I know into a format that I don't have to repeat myself and do the work every time. And that's the same thing here. When I go to create content, I think with the end in mind. And what I oftentimes do is start with video. You don't have to, but with video you've got all the other modalities covered because If I cover that topic with video, now I can go send that to my assistant or outsourcer, and we can extract the audio. And the audio can be used a number of ways, as we'll talk about later. Podcasting is one thing for other lead generation efforts, but more importantly in your follow-up, as we'll talk about. And then from that audio or even video, we can extract a transcript. And then from transcript, heck, we can go get a we can go get a writer to make several summaries and articles and blog posts, if not do them myself, you know, from that video and audio. So I always, when I produce content, I take the extra time to do them in all 3 modalities. And why that's important comes to play when you're actually following up, and that's the next step, right? Or I think we cover that in step 5. But yeah, for now, Try to put your content in different modalities. And oftentimes testing different modalities up front, you may find— and I often say, forests, trees, branches, leaves. And too many people, you go to conferences and stuff, and they say, hey, if you use a red headline, you're going to up your conversions by 50%. If you use Carrier, or Tahoma, or Arial— maybe if you're driving millions of hits, and you're Agora, and you need that extra edge, you're on TV, those things come into play, you're getting 200 visitors today. I mean, you go try it yourself, but that red headline probably won't make a difference because it's leaves. It's leaves in the big scheme of things. It's not the forest. So oftentimes the forest is going to be the actual audience you're targeting, the theme, the topic, that headline up there. Am I going after my gospel or my jazz? Is there a message-to-market match between them? Am I trying to take my jazz people and give them something too general? Do I need to maybe Can we cater that lead magnet specifically to them? Those are like forests and if anything trees. Those are big to medium picture things. But in the beginning you don't deal with branches and leaves. Those are optimization factors that come into play later once you've got something working and you want to squeeze it and you want to take it up a notch, then you go to those things. Well, modalities comes into play there as well. Testing ebook versus, you know, that little Mac screen with video on it, you know. And that, you may see a change there. Audio versus video. And so multimodalities is very important. But, but there's something else. There's another way. There's another reason I use them that we'll talk about later.

Now, where do you put this content? All right, do you put it on your website? Do you put it on YouTube? Do you put it on Facebook?— what do you— okay, I've created all this content. I know how you use it later on, but is there anywhere else that we're going to use this immediately?

[Speaker:ADRIAN WILSON] Right. Well, see what I do is I have the content. The content goes on my blog. And a lot of people, they'll broadcast out their daily blog or they'll collect it into a weekly archive or digest or something like that. But for me, I'm all about follow-up. And I use Infusionsoft. Some people, if you use Infusionsoft, You may remember or even voted for me, Marketer of the Year, Marketer of the Year 2011. Boy, has time passed, but that strategy, we won that off of a 178-step follow-up sequence, which means you get on my list and there may be a different lead magnet here or a detour, or you may come in in one way, but eventually you're going to get on that 178 nurture sequence, and that's oftentimes what I'm doing. Creating this content for front-end stuff, but in other lead magnets. Let's say I go with one lead magnet here, but I'm not going to forsake that asset I created a year ago. I'm going to plop that at the end of my main sequence. So you're eventually going to see that step whether you're on my list, you're actively visiting my website seeing it live on the blog, or you come to get in my fold a year from now. You're going to see that step because I don't believe— I don't believe in doing things once and throwing them off to the wayside. I really believe launches are great, don't get me wrong. They bring in lots of business in a finite period of time, but the mistake people make is they have this wonderful launch. They have these assets. They have these emails, these content, pieces of content that work, and they just forget about them. They have their million-dollar launch and they forget about them. Me? No. We recycle, reduce— not reduce— recycle, reuse. And we put those steps into live sequences to the point where when you get on my follow-up sequence, and you know me, like I have a buddy, we play basketball 24 hours. He's like, hey, how are you up? Aren't you launching a jazz program tomorrow? And I say, no, I'm launching it to you, but I created that 3 years ago, brother. Shoot that free throw, let's go. That's how it works. For him, he's going through that sequence sequence of something I launched years ago, but I don't forsake ignoring it. I put that at the end of my sequence. So that comes to play later as well, because lead generation is only part of it. They talk about traffic versus conversion, and many people think they have a traffic problem, and that's not the case. I've never found that to be the case, especially on Facebook. If I put a $100 budget on my Facebook day, or $1,000 budget, Facebook has never not been able to send me that traffic. Now Google is all mysterious and sometimes that has been the case for Google. I want to spend $1,000. I want to spend $10,000 and it's just not there. Facebook, I haven't found that problem, but the problem is going bankrupt building your list, you know, conversion and then conversion to sale and then sale to repeat sale and repeat the content. That's the problem and content drives all of that. So you want to be, if anything, you want to be a content-producing machine, a modality-producing machine. And my triangle happens to be audio, video, written. You do those things and you've got the assets to put in place for various ways in the future.

Fantastic. All right, let's move on to step number 4, which is okay, now we've got all this content. We've got something that we're going to put on, or a number of things that we're going to test test and have traffic drive to. We have to design our opt-in form. There are people that say, "Well, the only thing that you really should collect on there is the email address because your opt-in rate is so much higher if you just ask for email address. If you ask for any more information, your opt-in rate is going to go down." I know you have a different take on this, so why don't you talk about that?

I do. I do have a different take. In fact, if you go to hearandplay.com right now, depending on when you're listening to this,. But right now, first name, email, and then that 2 additional pieces of information that I advocated in step 1. For me, again, I'm asking for a favorite style. I'm asking for a skill level because those pieces of information allow me to put people on a specific list. And nowadays, I don't care what you use, Infusionsoft, AWeber, GetResponse, or your own thing. Now we've got the ability very easily now to take people down different paths. You're only collecting email Maybe you are. Maybe it does bump you 5%, 10%, maybe 15%. But now you are having to talk to everybody the same. You can't even acknowledge them by name. Many will argue that that matters or doesn't matter. But in my niche, in my demographic which tends to skew a little bit older, it does matter. I have data that when I put name in subject, that has not gone cold. Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising, he talks about sophistication of markets. So it does depend. You're dealing with marketers or internet marketing, maybe things get old, so you have to take that into consideration. But no, I'm an advocate for collecting as much information as I can within reason. Now, you're a broker, you're a real estate agent, you don't go collecting everything about them and their income and how much they think their house is worth. And all that stuff. I do advocate breaking it up. And worst-case scenario, you can put it on the thank you page. I want to say this is advanced, but it's not even advanced. If you've been there, Infusionsoft's help files, they've got it so that if you send them from one Infusionsoft form to another one, it's automatically collecting. It knows who they are. So if you really wanted to, you can do what the other gurus say and only collect the minimal piece of information. You actually see this being done I've done on my blog, hearandplay.com/main. If you look on the right side there, there's an opt-in, or there are probably a few that only ask for name and email, but you better believe on that thank you page, without collecting email again, you don't want to collect what you have, we're asking for that additional piece of information. Either way, whether you do it broken up or you do it all together, that additional piece of information makes the difference. Dan always talks about message to market match. How can you have a message to market match and you don't even know who you're talking to. You can't. Now, you know, someone say, well, Jermaine, well, if my lead magnet is specific— okay, that's true, that's true. I can get around this by creating a lead magnet specifically for jazz beginners. But look at how many lead magnets I have to come up with, how many combinations I need to do now just to know who they are. See, I want to leverage things. So if I know that finding the key of the song is something you got to know whether you're in a jazz, gospel, blues, rock, pop, because you're playing by ear here. You're playing without sheet music. Well, I can use that same lead magnet like Dan would use his magnetic marketing and talk to plumbers and talk to this group and that. I want to be able to do that. So by collecting their information but going with that lead magnet that talks to many of them, but now we can bring them into our fold, bringing them into our follow-up system and talk specifically to them. So I think it's very important, and again, it goes back to goes back to the scope in which you look. Are you short-term or are you long-term? See, if Proactive Solutions did everything by cost per customer or cost per lead, you wouldn't hear stories of them waiting several months to break even. What is it? I think I heard 7 or 8 months just to break even. Yeah, and don't quote me, but it's several months because they see the big picture. And I can't say I wait that long, But we know off of Facebook what our customers specifically from Facebook using Infusionsoft, using what they call their lead source tracking. That's something that most CRM should have. And I don't want to go off on a tangent, but using that I can know what they're worth in 30 days, what they're worth in 60, 90. I can go back to people who joined in January. I can run a report right now and those people I know how much they're worth from January to now, and then I can go and say how much I spent on them. And if that makes sense, hey, we've got a winner. But most people, they're too short-sighted, so they're looking just at email, not looking at what that takes away from their ability to personalize, to build rapport, relationship, and ultimately to convert more.

Yeah, and again, the power of the lead magnet— this is a call that you guys are going to have to listen to again because because what he just said right there was a whole lesson in and of itself. The power of your lead magnet, if somebody really wants it, they're going to be willing to give you more information. The perfect example is Dan Kennedy did something with one of our Dime members, Matt Zagula, and they were advertising for a free book. This is a free book. They advertised in a trade magazine and the entire ad for the free book drove people to a landing page. The landing asked for not only name and email address, and of course it asked for their address to send them the book, but then it asked them how much money they were making, what their overall production was, and everything like that. 80% of the people who came to that site gave all of that information in order to get the free book because they really wanted the free book. Obviously, Jermaine, the more information they give you, quite frankly, more than likely Actually, it's a better qualified lead for you, too, isn't it?

Absolutely, absolutely. If they're only willing to give you email, step back and go up 10,000 feet and ask yourself, well, when is the— how likely are they to reach in their back pocket and pull out that credit card? If this is a matter of first name versus email or even versus— I mean, think about it. What's your skill level? Who's going to sit back and say, why do they want to know I don't want to know that. Why does this hearandplay.com want to know if I'm a beginner or advanced? That doesn't make sense. They want to tell you that because there is an expectation that, hey, maybe that lesson is going to be catered to me if I put beginner. And people will tell me that. People will tell me that. They'll say, even if I've missed it, let's say I send them to a lesson that maybe I thought was for a beginner and maybe it's a little too advanced, they'll tell me. I get emails all the time He says, "When I first joined, I put beginner." And that makes us have to think, "Well, are we moving too fast?" They remember. They know. And there's an expectation there as well. So it may even increase conversions because of that alignment there. So I'm a big advocate for data collection. I think when you try to scale, we already know, Dave, the highest, most effective way to sell is face-to-face. It's just not the most scalable. So now when you move to online methods, You lose that face-to-face. You lose that ability to look at cues and body language and to kind of change that message dynamically as you get their questions and their objections. You lose that. Quite frankly, you lose that. But by being able to collect data and track what they do with Infusionsoft and some advanced ways to do that, now that data becomes your ears and your eyes, and it does close that gap that gap more so than just relying on mass, just spray and pray. Everybody gets the same thing. Everybody gets the same launch. Everybody gets— and you find your attrition, and you find your unsubscribes, and your spam rates, all that stuff becomes problematic in the way that people, quite frankly, made a lot of money, but those ways are changing.

Yeah, those days are pretty much going away, or they're gone. So a really important The next step is probably my favorite out of all of the steps because it was new to me. You're the only person I've heard of doing this and the only person I know who's teaching it for sure. I've studied a lot of people. Here's step number 5. You say it's semi-advanced but it's easy to implement. You say that what you want to do is use a CRM that tracks email clicks and organize content follow-up in a way that users users who do not engage are reminded about the content that they did not engage in. Instead of just letting it go by, you remind them of the content. Can you describe this in detail?

This is really crazy powerful.

Yes, yes.

In fact, the first way we did this 10 years ago when we just discovered the power of autoresponders, you mean I can line up 10 messages or 100 messages and they're going to go out in a predetermined amount of time? That was crazy to me. Best thing since sliced bread. And that's phase 1, but there's a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I mean, if you're just not following up, period, just start following up. Add some extra messages and you'll probably have revolutionary results. Well, once you've got that going and you're looking for that next edge, that next level of conversion, it comes down to actually seeing what they consume. You'd be surprised. I know of one marketer that has a 6-month sequence in the dating niche, and he just repeats the sequence. And by golly, I've been on his list for 3 years, and I know I start catching on, like, this looks familiar, but I don't know for sure. Because I mean, we think when we make our marketing, we think that people are gonna remember every word, every sentence, every headline, because that's how we're connected to it. You know, we remember things. I met the president like 3 months ago, and I'm gonna be at the White House again this weekend. And to me I'm like, I wonder if he's going to remember me. But he sees so many people. For me it was a life-altering experience, but for him I don't know, I'm just another guy. Well, same way with your marketing. You think just because you put it out there people are consuming it. But think about open rates, a good open rate 20%. We get upwards of 40%. Click-through rate 5%, 7%, 10% if you're lucky. Well, that means most people are not consuming your content. So you want to set it up in their campaign builder. It's goal-based. It's goal-oriented. So the goal is, did they click the darn email to go get the report, to go consume the video? Because if they didn't click, well, I have no business trying to move on to the next step. So we will oftentimes set up what I call worst-case scenario sequences. And oftentimes my magic number is 3. So they opt in. They get into this sequence, and it literally is like a rectangle. You drag it on the screen within Infusionsoft, and inside of that rectangle tango, there's 3 emails and they may have a difference of a day or 2 delay. So the first email is right away, hey, go over to your free video sequence. Here are some bullet points, some benefits, call to action, bam. They don't consume.

Why?

Because they don't get that goal. They click on the email, that goal is satisfied, this stuff turns off, null and void, no more reminders for that step. They don't click, well, they're still in the sequence because it's a worst-case scenario sequence. Sequence. And so what am I doing in the second email? And even people that use this, they've heard me talk about it and viewed and stuff, sometimes in the beginning they'll get it wrong. They just follow up with the same thing. And that's fine to do. Often I've already laid the scenario here. Most people aren't even seeing the first email or being engaged by it. So oftentimes you can just change up the subject and send the same email to be honest. But what we'll do we'll go back to that modality thing. So if we started with video, we'll say, "Hey, I realize maybe you guys aren't at the computer or you're working, and I respect that. Hey, here's the audio version. And here's even the iPhone version. You click this, it'll pop up right on your iPhone, and you can listen to it on the way to work. You can listen to it in the gym. You can listen to it at the grocery store." So here's another way to consume it. Zoom. And then I'll even sometimes I'll lead with the apology email, you know the one, maybe you clicked to check out and our website went down. Well, the same way, hey, maybe you saw the video and for whatever reason it wasn't for you. I'm sorry. I apologize. Here's another version. Here's the audio. And then at the end, the third email for example, if they don't click to proceed and move on, we might send the eBook version. We may send the written version. "Again, with the preface that hey, maybe audio/video is not for you, or maybe you just missed this. I don't know, but hey, here's the written version." And what that does, it gives a reason for the follow-up, but a reason that doesn't come across as nagging. You know the one, "I'm making sure you saw this." That can. I'm going to be honest, that can have the potential to be nag-like. Grandma saying, "Hey, be careful when you cross the street." You're like, "I know, Grandma. I'm a grown man." That literally does still happen to me. Be careful when you're flying on planes. I'm like, Grandma, is this my time to go? There's nothing I can be careful about on that plane. There's nothing I can do but know where my flotation device is. So we have those different modalities that cater to different people, and that's very powerful because it allows you to touch them but in ways that still continue to give value. And every time they get an email from you, they say, Jermaine equals value. Jermaine doesn't equal just always trying to remind me to buy his product. Jermaine equals value. And you know that, you know currency, how it works in your own mind. Think about the emails. When their name pops up in your email, you click it, you open it, because you know there's value connected to it. Then there's other people you say, ah, I could put this in my archive. Then there's other people that just don't even make it past that barometer.

So who do you want to be? Yeah, I love that. So again, I just want to recap that step because it's such a great, great step. So first of all, you got to use a CRM. Really, any CRM will do this, but that'll track the email clicks. So if somebody doesn't, you know, click on the link or, you know, go and get the report or whatever, whatever the first thing is, then your main strategy is to have a follow-up email sequence, one or two additional emails that say, hey, now we've got it in— if let's say it was audio first, well, now we've got it in written form. And then the next, oh, we've got in video form. It's just so cool because like you said, you're not now nagging. You're providing really great value and great content. For someone like me, for example, and there's a lot of people like me, I don't want to go watch a 45-minute video. I'm not going to sit there in front of my computer and watch it. I'm just not going to do it. But I will read a PDF for sure, and I might even listen to, like if I'm on the treadmill, I might listen to an audio. It's such a beautiful strategy. Such a beautiful strategy. Thank you for sharing that with us. Step number 6, okay. So now we've got to— finally got to the step where we're going to actually be driving some traffic, all right. But all of these steps are mission critical before you get to step 6. So you say drive traffic to opt-in pages and continually test.

Let's discuss that. Absolutely. And this is one of those like, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? So you have to, you have to really be be mindful here. Because in step 5, you don't go making this 170-step sequence because Jermaine said it's working over at Hear and Play before the traffic. So there's like this, what comes first? Is it the traffic? Is it the conversion? But the truth is, somewhere in the middle, you have to set up the convert. You don't go and just set up your opt-in page and then you deliver the content, but you have no follow-up.

Follow-up.

But that doesn't mean you have to like spend all this time in analysis paralysis setting up, you know, weeks and weeks before you go launch with the traffic. So there's like this, this do something, sit back, look at results. Do— it's like this input-output feedback, you know, kind of loop. So, so just keep that in mind. But when you are— once you've got your like worst-case scenario sequence, you've got a few things set up there, now it's time to drive some traffic. Let's get some results. Let's— don't just sit back, say I'm crafting the perfect conversion funnel. No, I see a lot I see people trying to be mad scientists and they get this wrong and they don't actually get to results, action. So step 6 is let's get some traffic. Let's get some traffic coming because that'll be the key decider. So we drive traffic to our opt-in pages and we're going back to those headlines. That's why it's important in step 2 to have a really good brainstorming session and to really get as many headlines. I'm not talking about dozens. I mean, I'm not talking about single, I'm talking about dozens. I'm talking about hundreds if you can. I mean, top copywriters will make 100 headlines just for the first one they decide on. I mean, how serious are you with this? I mean, and it also depends on how much results you get. In fact, I gave you 6 templates. Why not take every dominant theme that comes through, through your surveying, your data collection, and turn it into all 6? Now you've already got your list when it comes time for step number 6. You've got your list to just go down that that list. We use Visual Website Optimizer, and very easy, you just copy their code to your page and they literally let you sit there on your website and change the headline by clicking on it. I don't know how they do it. This wasn't here 10 years ago. You can, like, without even logging into your website, it's just that code. That code takes over your, your page and it puts their headline there that you did in their system. Edit, easy as that. So I can go switch my headlines and then I can let that run for a week and see the results. I can switch my modality. I can change the picture from an eBook to a video screen. I love that little mouse monitor and you can put the screenshot right in there. Then I can change that to an MP3 file or what have you. But the key here is you're testing, you're rotating subject lines, and your primary lead magnets. Make that list. And the more lead magnets you offer or you have that you can test, just the higher chances for increased conversions and that breakthrough. You know, for me in 2002, my breakthrough was because I— when I bought Corey Rudl's course, I was willing to do more than just one thing. I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. I created several headlines. I created several versions of my sales page. I remember the day I went from from just 4 sentences in a book to this long 26-page sales letter. March 2nd, 2002, I woke up with $1,100 in sales that next day. That was my turning point because I was willing to do— it wasn't just one thing. Dan says that the worst number in business is 1, so you've got to have multiple lead magnets. That's why you can't treat this lead magnet like I hear people say, I'm almost done with my ebook, I got 8 more months to go. You're probably doing the wrong system. You just need to get out your iPad and just start talking. Let somebody transcribe that. You'd be surprised how fast you can get a lead magnet up. But, but having this slow, drawn-out process is probably not working for you, and you may find that it doesn't even work, and then it's disheartening because because you've done this thing for 6 months, you put it up, and you just don't get traction. And there you are saying, I tried it. So speed is important. Done is better than perfect. And 1 is the worst number in this process, so have multiples of everything. And I would start personally with Facebook. If we're doing the Facebook versus Google talk, for me, I use both, and I do retargeting. I do all kinds of stuff. Stuff, but Facebook has been the easiest. I could have an ad up right now. Within 3 minutes, I'm getting an email saying it's approved. Within an hour, I could have hundreds of clicks depending on my budget. VWO is collecting data, and we've got something up within an hour. That data is coming in for it. That's how fast this process can work. Like I said, if you start with video, you automatically have 3 things to test right there. There, and then not including the headline. So very important, this is the action step out of everything, or this is the thing that gets the ball rolling.

Perfect. And while we're on step 6, because you've mentioned technology and how much easier it is, I mean, can you imagine marketers, you know, even 20 years ago, but like, you know, the guys that really did this heavy duty, like back in the '30s and '40s, what they would do with this information or this technology? Can you imagine? It's insane. They would be jumping for joy. We mentioned technology and just going back to step number 4, we're almost completed with all the steps. If we go back to step number 4, a lot of people wonder, "Well, geez, how do I go about putting these opt-in pages?" Jermaine, when you and I got started, we were using FrontPage and stuff, but it's so much easier now, isn't it, to do all of this stuff, to set up the downloads for your ebook.

It's really simple now, isn't it? My gosh, it's like night and day. In fact, I still succumb to opening up FrontPage sometimes because I have some old templates there. But truth be told, between all the new technologies, I mean, if you're a WordPress user, you've got a number of plug-ins over there. I've used OptimizePress. You point and click and there's already proven templates that you literally click on the headline and change it. This isn't something now where you have to be a web designer or even hire a web designer for hundreds and thousands of dollars. In fact, I have one marketer friend that all of you guys would know, a guru. We always talk about this. He's like, you know what? I don't want to be worried about that. I just pay $1,500 for my landing page and it's up. I say, bless your heart. That's something we'll always debate. $1,500 at a time. That means 10 pages, $15,000. And hey, if your numbers work that way for you to be able to just waste that— but I'm like, because he doesn't know how to just go in, point and click, or somebody on his team, his assistant, somebody just click and change that headline. I just can't— I don't care if you're making a billion dollars, I just can't imagine spending that for the point— because that's all the other people are doing. They're just pointing and clicking and taking your money. But hey, whatever floats your boat. So now the website is not the problem. If you're spending any you see unnecessary energy frustration on the website aspect or the landing page, you've missed it. You've missed it.

Just go over to LeadPages, go over to OptimizePress, and that will be easy and evident and self-explanatory. Fantastic. Fantastic. That's absolutely right. Don't get caught up in the technology. That's not where you make the money. You make the money by creating the content, by writing the headlines, by doing the marketing. The technology The technology is really, really easy. Dude, the reason that guru's people aren't telling them about it is because they don't want them to know about it, that they don't want to really be paying this person that much money. Right. All right. We've got step number 6, which is drive the traffic. Our last step in this process is that you say that the content should ultimately relate to and promote paid programs. This is when we start selling stuff. I love the language that you use for your paid programs.

So talk a little bit about that, and let's talk about step 7, then we'll wrap it up. Right, absolutely. So if you've moved the free line a little bit and you've given great content up front, well, it lends itself to using language like continuing education resources. The only reason I can say continuing is because I have given them something. Don't go trying to use this language and you've just given them your worst stuff and you're giving them something that didn't really change their life. And I try to give them things that— and my motto is, I want to leave you better than I found you. And I ask them, I have a post-survey even too that says, did I leave you better than I found you? I've got like a 90-plus percentage of people that tell me, indeed you did. Well, you might want to take me up on my continuing education resources. And it just comes across lovely. Less salesy, and it keeps that guard down because it's just a natural progression. When I consider markets, there's these 4 Ps I came up with like 12 years ago. And market must have passion— music qualifies for that. It must have positivity. I know you can make money in pain, but for me, for my psyche and how I am, I just dwell in positivity. So I just pick happy, positive niches. But again, it doesn't matter. You can be a divorce lawyer and deal in pain. There's some money to be made there as well. And we need lead you. But positivity, passion, progression— there must be progression in it. That golf swing is never mastered. There's always a next level. Music, you're never at the destination. And then there must be patience, right? I know there's a next level, but I'm not asking for it to be here tomorrow. And so with those 4 Ps, it lends itself to this kind of language. Okay, so hey, you've mastered the first step. Well, here's the second, third, fourth, steps, and here's our continuing education resources. So like Jim Rohn, again, I said it before, think with the end in mind, start with the end in mind. Those topics that they tell you, if you say, well, I don't have a product for them, well, what's the answer? What's the solution to that? You better go create the product. If your product is something that's so opposite or different that your lead magnets, the ones that they're asking you for by way of answering that single biggest question, if your lead magnet magnets, I mean your products, your first initial offerings, don't somehow relate to that or can be translated or conveyed to be the next step or some kind of future step, then you've got a problem. You should be going to then develop products. Again, these aren't 6-month, 9-month projects. Teleseminars, what we're doing here. Pick up the phone.

Start talking.

Record it. This is a teleseminar. Go have an event. Invite your brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and record the darn One thing, these aren't things that take months and months. These are just get it done kinds of things, especially if you're like me. You've got passion, you've got the knowledge inside of you. If you don't, you're the reporter, you're the Napoleon Hill. Find a me, find somebody that has the passion and knowledge inside of them and get these products done that align with their single biggest questions. That way you take the chunk out, a really good chunk by the way, that gives them those results in advance. They become raving fans, the relationship is solidified. And then the natural progression, one of the P's, the natural progression is your continuing education resources. And so you make that first offer. And the beauty in doing that step number 5 where you move them along is that step number 5 deals with speed, right? If someone hasn't clicked to your free magnet and then you do the different modality thing, you do the ID, that's a day or two that has gone by. And then you do the video, that's a day or two that has gone by. Well, someone who is consuming, someone who is on your team if you will, they go through fast because they don't have all those follow-up steps. So they immediately satisfy that goal. And oftentimes we don't want them to not benefit as much as someone who is not, so we will send them the PDF and audio anyway in that thank you email. Hey, I noticed you clicked to your video. Hey, here are some other bonuses that I know you're going to enjoy because you're an action taker. Congratulations. And then now we're moving them ahead. And so those people actually get to the first continuing education offer naturally faster than the people taking their time. So that all depends on how you set up your worst-case scenario sequence. So this works magically because Dave can speed line through and then Marcy or Darcy can, can take her time, you know, or, you know, for whatever reason she may not make it there. We'll eventually make her an offer as well, but not as fast. So yeah, that is it. And if it doesn't make dollars, it doesn't make sense. You've got to track. If you're using Infusionsoft and you haven't dug into lead sources, you want to track, and you can do that on your opt-in page. You can say, this person is from Facebook. I want Infusionsoft to know that. That way, 30 days later you can go into their sales report and you can say, give me all my sales from people that are from Facebook. Facebook and it'll tell you. It'll say $5,000 and then you can go back to Facebook and say, "Well, how much did I spend for these people during that same time period?" and it'll say $1,000 or it'll say $2,500 and you say, "Wow, this makes sense." Then 3 months later you don't stop. You do it 3 months later and that same group worth $5,000 may very well be worth $12,000 and that's when you really know you've made money because then you can go back to Facebook and you can say, "Hey, I can spend a lot more than what I'm spending in there, and that's where it doesn't become a traffic problem, a conversion problem. One thing feeds the other. They work in conjunction with each other, and that's really the name of the game, but it starts with collecting leads. It starts with data collection, and it starts with that message-to-market match, that follow-up, that nurture, and eventually that first sale, and that sale begets future sales and continuity and such, but that's the 7 steps, Dave.

Jermaine, before we go, we do have a question. It's a pretty good question and you kind of touched upon it with your answer just a minute ago, but before we go, can you answer this one question? It comes from Angelo from Mexico.

Angelo says, how can I produce the content if I'm not an expert in the topic? Right, and that's a common question that comes along. Well, there's a book and I mentioned it earlier. There's a book that changed the world. It's called Think and Grow Rich.. And I even think Napoleon may have, may have died broke, you know. I think, I think I've heard some people say that, right? But, but it didn't— it does not negate the power of the subject matter that he brought us through his lens, you know, as he interviewed, you know, the richest people of the world at that time. So he played what we call the reporter role. And I have a secret for you, I have a secret. These fingers that I'm looking at right now, these fingers haven't consistently touched the piano. I mean, I play, I have a piano in my living room and I play for my kids, but professionally speaking, these fingers have traded in their ivory notes for plastic computer notes.

You know, I had to play the marketer.

For C notes, my friend, for C notes. C notes, that's right. And I'll take those, I'll take those, because you know, if I stayed playing the music and forsaken the marketing and how I stumbled into to this, I wouldn't be talking to Dave right now. So truth be told, what do I do? I have several products now that are other musicians. I got the world's top gospel musicians. They're on my payroll. They get a rate to come in and do the course. And the thing is, people still can mix how good that person is. They clump me right on in with it. They're like, I can't wait till I get to you and Jason White's level. No, Jason White is yards ahead of me.

Musically, right?

But it works that way. And we clump Napoleon Hill with that as well. So we say, you know, Napoleon Hill and Andrew Carnegie. So there's something to be said about the reporter role. Go find the experts, because the experts aren't the marketers. You— there's a chess book— I got into chess 2 years ago, and there's a guy, Farnsworth. He's got, oh my gosh, a chess course that could probably sell for $1,000. He's selling it on Amazon as $20. Books. But these are workbooks. These are things that I would pay for because they're just that rich. His ranking leaves a lot to be desired. He's a candidate if I were pursuing, you know, a chess informational business. Hey, go find him if you're out there and you're into this. But there are many people like that that are experts. They love what they do, but they just don't have the expertise. You talk about lead generation and conversion and headlines, they're just overwhelmed by that. They think you're a genius. Genius spitting that kind of knowledge to them. So that's what you do. And then over time you just may develop the skills to become and walk into that expert role yourself, but you need not wait to begin.

Fantastic. Jermaine, you rocked it. You killed it. You killed it. So thank you very much.

I really appreciate having you on.

Thank you, Dave. Good luck to you all. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.