How To Scale Cold Traffic with Justin Goff

For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and today I've got Justin Goff with me. And Justin is a amazing marketer and entrepreneur who has had a very wild ride over his career. And he has been responsible for not only taking a company up to $23 million and selling, making a ton of money with it, but. But he's also helped a lot of other entrepreneurs and business owners do very similar things using his cold marketing strategies. That is one of the really the holy grails for a lot of business owners is how to convert cold traffic into customers. One of the other interesting things that Justin will talk about is his ride up the success ladder only to find out that it wasn't what he expected and having to do some real deep personal development and realizing that it's not necessarily all it's cracked up to be and not necessarily worth the chase at any cost. So today we're going to dive into Justin Goff's brain and we're going to pull out all the good stuff and also show you what happens if you chase the wrong priorities in life. Justin, welcome to Bacon Wrap Business.

Thank you for the intro and thanks for having me, man.

My pleasure. Yeah, I've heard a lot of good things about some of the stuff you've done and a lot of our mutual friends I just hear, man. Yeah, Justin Goff this, Justin Goff that. And he's helped here and he's helped there. And I know that cold traffic, as I mentioned, is one of the big holy grails. Before we dive into some of the meaty stuff that people are going to want to pull out a notepad and take some notes on. Let's go back a little bit because you've got a pretty interesting story on how you develop these skills because it doesn't sound like you were born with the silver brain and figured it out on your first try and just made a fortune. You're coming out of the gate. Overnight success.

No, I'm definitely what they call the accidental entrepreneur. Mine all started when I was in college, so actually started as a result of a twelve hundred dollar gambling debt that I had in college. I was a really big sports better in college and I was actually really good at it. I would make enough like every College football season to basically pay like books and not have to get a job and pay part of like my living expenses. So I loved it for that. Basically one year I got pretty damn cocky thinking I was better than I was. And I think I was up like $2,000 that year. And then I bet way more money than I had one weekend and I lost literally all seven games that I bet on. And I went from like up $2000 to I owed a big 6 foot 7 bookie $1200 that I did not have.

Oh no. So that's like right out of a movie.

Yeah, that's how everything started. And interestingly at the time I remember there used to be all these guys who would sell their like sports picks online. And I was like, hmm. I was like I'm pretty damn good at this. Like maybe I could make a website and sell my pics. That's how I can make all this money back. So I set up this website. I mean this was like 2004. So this is even like way before WordPress and like it was just the ugliest damn thing ever. Nobody bought anything. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm just like spamming forums and trying to get traffic. Had no idea what I was doing. Ended up having to go get a job as a valet to pay off his debt. But I actually kept at it for the next six months. It all kind of came to a head when I was actually back at my parents house for Christmas break, sitting there in their computer room playing around on my email and I noticed I had a payment from PayPal for $149. Had no idea what it was. I clicked on it and I go in there and some guy went to the website and bought one of my picks package and I was like just shocked, like absolutely shocked. I literally jumped up and down, ran around the room like a 12 year old girl. I was like screaming.

This was that first moment that you made a dollar online, right? I remember it well. 6-2-2008 for me. I remember it well.

Yeah, it's crazy how everyone remembers those because it's like I've had days since then where I've had, I don't know, probably done 250, $300,000 on a, on a big promotion and like those kind of past like whatever, I don't think of them. But that first sale I still remember. I still remember like what the room looked like. I remember the brown carpet. I remember like everything sitting there. For me more than anything that was like proof that this was possible because at the time, it was really a pipe dream. And I just kept doing it. I didn't know anyone who did anything like this. There wasn't, like, the Internet marketing community that there is today where you could find a bunch of, like, mentors and stuff on. Like I said, this is like 2004. So I was really just shooting in the dark, trying shit. And when that kind of happened, it was the first glimpse that there was actually something there.

Yeah. That's fantastic. So sports betting. And then you got into that. So did you build a sports betting business? Is that the next thing?

So this is actually funny. So I looked at a bunch of the other websites, seeing what they were doing, and I noticed that a lot of them had banners to all these sports sites and to poker sites is back when, like, party poker and poker stars and all that were huge. I literally did not realize that they were, like, sending people to those websites and getting, like, affiliate commissions. I was like, oh, those banners look really cool. And I'm like, literally copying them off their websites and, like, placing them on my website.

No way.

That's awesome. I was like, oh, that's like, sweet. Yeah. Then finally I eventually kind of realized what was going on. Then I actually found a forum where a couple guys who were like, affiliates for poker sites were talking on. And I was like, oh. And I found out. I'm like, oh, they get paid 125 bucks for every guy they send to them. I was like, oh, this is pretty amazing. So I kind of jumped into that. I was a big poker player as well. So I built a couple poker sites, did that for a few years, and that was the first kind of real taste of making money because I went from. I think I made like 20 grand my first year as a poker affiliate, which was awesome. And then I think the year after I made about 40 grand. And then I. I made a big leap. And the year after that was when I broke six figures. I think I made 110.

How old were you at this point?

I was probably 25, 24 or something like that.

Nice. I didn't discover the whole world of digital marketing, really, until I was about 33. And I get so jealous of people who discovered kids these days, or Even the past 10 years, who are teenagers and figuring this stuff out and didn't have to go through all the normal job roles that we old people. Okay. So from then on, it was just success after success with zero failures. Is that right?

No, not even close. So after I had that $100,000 a year. I stupidly spent a bunch of money, but I didn't spend too much, so I actually had enough that I kept. And I lived pretty strict. I mean, I was living in an apartment that was 300 bucks a month. So, like, I was not spending much money at all. But I had a couple really rough years after that, and one of them where I literally only made, like, five grand because the whole poker thing just fell apart at some point. And then I was doing a lot of, like, black hat SEO stuff, and, like, that's two pages get wiped out and 80% your income is gone. It's like, okay. So I did the poker thing for a while, and then probably around 2009, I got really into working out and I started doing the Paleo diet. And I was seeing really good results with that. And the trainer I was working out with, I was like, I feel like there's something here. I was like, a lot of people don't know about this stuff yet. Like, we should probably. We should make a product out of this and try to sell it online. And he was all for it. So we did that. And I didn't really understand how to do it. Like, we built a blog and we're trying to grow a following. We did that for like a year and a half and just never really went anywhere.

By the way, isn't it kind of funny is that once you really are into this, like, once you kind of step out of the matrix and you see what's possible with this, everything you see, you're like, oh, man, we gotta. We should create a product around that. Like, everything becomes a product. Like, hey, this, there's something to this. Let's go.

The hardest thing for me to do now is to not do stuff, because I have a file of, like, 40 ideas where I'm like, every one of these would probably do damn well, and I just can't do them.

Exactly.

But, yeah, so that's when I kind of got in the fitness space. We started making ebooks. My big kind of revelation around that was 2010. I actually wrote about this on my email list today. So 2010, I had had a couple bad years after the poker stuff. I was not really making any money. Nothing was working for me. So I was sitting on this ebook that me and my partner put together. I wrote the copy for it, and I was kind of just being super complacent. I wasn't, like, getting it up. I was just kind of like, Wally gagging around. Then I kind of had what I Dubbed the week from hell. Basically this week that really honestly just changed my life in so many ways. Basically in the span of about three days. I had a consulting client at the time who was paying me like 4,500 bucks a month to do SEO for him. He fired me because he was moving on and doing some other business. He's like, I didn't have any need for me anymore. Two days after that. I grew up near Cleveland. I was a huge Cleveland fan. This is the day that LeBron James went on national TV and said he was leaving Cleveland and going to Miami. I was like, tore my heart out. And literally that exact same night, probably about two hours later, my girlfriend at the time, who had been dating for like three years, who I was planning to propose to, came home from work and said she was breaking up with me. This is like literally in a three day span, just like heartbroken twice, lost all my money. I'm just like, oh my God. It was just awful. So anyways, that all happened. I'm like left living in my crummy ass apartment, me and my dogs, sleeping on an air mattress. And I basically was really questioning myself in terms of being an entrepreneur. I honestly convinced myself that I had gotten lucky for the previous couple years and that I actually did not know what I was doing. So I thought about going out and getting a real job, maybe go work at some marketing firm. I thought about moving back in with my parents and trying to save money. And that thought just was so vile to me. I was like, no way. And then I basically thought about more and I was just like, okay, I have nothing to lose. I've been sitting on this product that I think is a good idea. I'm going to just go balls the wall with it for like two months and kind of see what it does. And really at this point, I had barely about a month's worth of living expenses left. I was not in great shape. So I really busted my ass. I got this thing up, made a vsl, made the offer, decided to. I knew a bunch of guys at the time who were kicking ass on Facebook doing these kinds of offers. So I kind of mimicked what they were doing. And I was like, all right. Started running traffic to it, literally like $10 a day just to see if I could do anything.

Now was this in the fitness, the Paleo space?

It was before kind of anybody knew what Paleo was. So we really didn't mention Paleo until later on. But yeah, it was essentially a Paleo diet and a very like, crossfit style workout. I was spending 10 bucks a day, and I started spending money on, made some sales. It wasn't breaking even. It wasn't making money or anything, but it made sales, and it consistently made sales. I was like, all right, there's something here. So then I got a little more dialed in with it. I learned how to dial in the targeting or remove a bunch of the targeting stuff that wasn't really working on Facebook. And I learned how to actually optimize the page and the VSL and all kinds of stuff like that. And within about, I don't know, I would say, like a month and a half or so, I had it pretty close to break even, where, like, I'd spend 100 bucks, and then I get back maybe 90 or I get back 102 bucks or something like that. And at that point, I saw I was like, okay, if I'm spending a hundred bucks now, spending 500 bucks really wouldn't be any different. Like, there's no more work for me. I just got to be able to fund it. I didn't really have the money to fund it, so started funding it slowly by slowly. And then I realized, okay, why don't I just take out a credit card and, like, fund it like that? Mm. That actually ended up working. So the credit card gave me the float because, like, I was waiting on ClickBank, too, to pay me, which is like, three weeks later. So I thought I'd, like, float a good, like, decent amount of money that I did not have. But anyways, it ended up working. I dialed it in, and what was interesting was I went from spending a hundred a day to 500 a day to within, like, three or four months, I was spending 5,000 a day. And that was the max on my Facebook account at the time. And when I was spending five grand a day, I was literally profiting two grand a day just straight off the front end. And this is like, back when I had no upsells, I had no backend. I literally wasn't even, like, mailing this email list. Like, I just look back at how much money I left on the table. It just makes me cringe. I know, but it made a bunch of money. And for me, really, like I said, I think in the first, it was probably about three months after that, I made a hundred grand in profit straight off this offer off cold traffic that I converted from Facebook. And that, that really, for me, where I was at, money wise, like, completely changed the game because that gave me. Not only did it give me the money to really keep scaling this thing. But it was the first thing where I was like, okay, I actually do know what I'm doing. I'm not some dude who just got, like, lucky for the last two years. Like, I could actually do this and that. That's why I think that was just a huge game changer for me.

Yeah, no, for sure is. And especially, well, I guess back then, it was a little easier doing stuff in the health, fitness, weight loss, etc. Things have gotten a little bit harder in that space and are continuously getting harder. So now that's the bit. Is that the same business that you grew to, what was it, 23 million in sales or. That was a different one.

So that was a different one. The supplement company I did about. I started around 2014. I started that with my partner, Brandon, who me. And he was a really good traffic buyer, and I was really good copywriter and marketer. So we built this. We started off with a testosterone supplement. This is kind of before testosterone was, like, really big, and that did well. We scaled that to, like, a million bucks in the first year. And then we both had the realization that we knew how to do traffic and make offers, but neither of us had any clue how to grow a company. Like, I had no idea how to hire someone or build a team or infrastructure. It was just none of us, we had no idea.

How did you overcome that?

So I actually, at the time, I randomly got an email from a friend of mine named Alan Baylor who had done really well in the survival space, and he was like, hey, I'm thinking of moving into the health space. He's like, do you have any interest in coming and working for me? And I was like, no. Why would I want to do that? And I was actually really kind of angry that he even asked it. I'm like, I ain't coming to work for you. But I took two days, and I thought about it, and I was like, hey, how about me, instead of me working with you, how about why don't we just partner together on this business? I was like, brandon seems like he might want to actually get out of it, so you might be able to buy him out. So we ended up talking, and that's actually what ended up happening. Alan bought Brandon out. And then Alan knew all the stuff that I didn't know. He knew how to scale the infrastructure. He already had employees. He knew how to handle all the operations stuff. Basically, everything I sucked at, he was good at, and vice versa. So it was a good fit. Him and I, together took that from a million to 7 million the next year and then 23 million in the third year. So it was a very quick growth, but it was actually very similar to how the first product I did grew because it was just all on the back of converting cold traffic. That was really our main focus.

Where was most of the. On that was most of the traffic. The cold traffic coming from Facebook, Google, native ad networks. Was there anything that kind of did most of the heavy lifting?

Yeah. So for us, it was actually email. And I don't mean like affiliate email. I mean literally cold email. Like, we would. But we marketed to the conservative boomer senior niche, which is, I don't know anybody over the. Anybody over the age of 60 who's reading, like, Glenn Beck and Newsmax and stuff like that. And we would just buy ads in all those online emails, like Glenn Beck and Newsmax and all that. I mean, there's just hundreds of them in that niche. And we were selling. We had a product called Patriot Power Greens, which was our first big hit. It was basically a greens powder came out before kind of all the other greens powders got really big. And we had a really unique angle on it, which was my cousin was in the Coast Guard at the time, and I was like, kind of thinking from the standpoint of this customer, I'm like, I know this customer. I know who they are. I know what they have affinity for. And the one thing I was like, conservatives have such an affinity for the military. Like, they love everything with the military. I'm like, how could we connect this to the military? So I sent this big box of our supplements to my cousin, who's in the Coast Guard at the time. I was like, yo, you and your unit, try these out. Give us some feedback on it. I want to hear what you think of it. So he did that, and a bunch of them gave us feedback. And one of the things that stood out to me in the feedback, there was, like, two guys in the group who. Who were like the old guys in their group, like, older. Like, most guys in the military are like 18, 19, 20 years old. I don't remember exactly how old they were, but they were basically old fogies compared to them. But they said in their testimonials or their feedback, it was basically, we've been. Our PT times have been, like, increasing. We got more energies. Like, the one guy had mentioned something about being able to keep up the young guys in the unit that he hadn't been able to do in a while. And me as a marketer, as soon as I heard that, I was like, that is the hook right there. I was like, that is exactly what this markets gonna want. And the credibility basically keeping up with.

The young guys, right?

Yeah. And the credibility of it being kind of like a military tested thing. And we put a nice spin on it that made it sound like it was like this elite drink that only military units could use before we ever sold it. So it had a great like hook on it and it worked like gangbusters. It just absolutely crushed. For about, I don't know, two and a half years. We brought in close to 300,000 new buyers that all spent 200 bucks. These were like good buyers, not like cheap free flow shipping guys. This is a pretty serious buyer. And yeah, that offer really getting that to convert on cold traffic really propelled everything for us.

I'll be damned. That's great. Now you said you really did a lot of email, solo ads, et cetera. And then did you also do much on the social media, advertising, et cetera?

We were like an old dinosaur. So we did email and then obviously everything that worked for us in cold email we gave to affiliates as well. And we were like, here, you can promote it as well. And then we actually did a lot of radio. We bought a bunch of remnant radio space and we would send them just straight to the website. That worked actually pretty damn well for us. It wasn't a huge part of it, but it was probably 20% of our overlook it.

Like nobody thinks about radio these days, but especially with certain markets like that, it's. I mean with remnant ad costs being really low. That's smart fast forward. You sold. You didn't sell the business. Right, but you sold your part of the business. You got out of it.

Yeah. So in 2017, I sold my stake back to my partner.

Okay, and then what was the reason you decided to do that? Did you just kind of want to move on to something else? Was it?

No, actually they approached me. So they kind of ran into an issue where, like I said, they had this other survival company that was kicking ass as well. And we were actually borrowing the employees from that company. So we paid them like a management fee to use their employees. The issue was our health company was growing so fast, they were putting so much time into it and they basically came to the conclusion where they're like, we own 100% of this survival company. We own 58% of this other company. It doesn't make any sense for us to put all this time into a business that we own 58% of when we own our own, that we own 100% of, which made sense. So they were like, we either want to get out of the health business or we want to buy you out and own the whole thing. So we kind of went through about a five month negotiation, went back and forth, and from everything I know of negotiations, ours was very clean and very friendly. And we're still friends now. I heard some horror stories from everyone else I talked to.

I bought out the first business I had. I bought out my. I had a 5050 partner, so I bought him out after a couple years and luckily it was just super smooth. We're still like best friends, but. Yeah, things can go wrong if you're not careful.

Yep, I can imagine.

Cool.

Okay.

So you sold out. And I'm going to guess you made a pretty penny.

I did. So, yeah. I got a multimillion dollar buyout. So that was great. And this is kind of what, cash?

Or did you get that? Or did you get that? Was it like an earn out over time? Like, we'll pay you over three years.

I actually got it all up front, so.

Beautiful.

That was great.

That had to be a pretty fun day. A fun wire to receive. I'm assuming it was a wire in, right?

Usually, yeah, it was. It was not a bag of bills. Yeah, yeah, it was. And it was interesting because I did a. At that time, I did one of the think tanks with David Gonzalez here, and I was basically like, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and had all these ideas. I was literally ready to jump into a new business right away. And everyone at the think tank told me, take time off. No matter how much time you think you should take, just take something off and just kind of decompress and you're never gonna have a chance again to really take time off like this. So do it. I did not want to hear that one bit.

Wanted to go, go, go. What's next?

Yes. I talked to about four different people who had sold their business as well, and they all told me the same thing. And they actually said, I'm either super grateful for the time I took off, or I wish I would have took more time off.

Nobody said, I wish I wouldn't have taken time off.

Yeah, that did not come up. So I was like, all right, these guys were all more successful than me. They've been there. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna listen to them. So there. I'm gonna take at least a couple months off. And what was interesting is it made me realize how Addicted, I was. To working.

Yeah.

Because I just literally kept waking up and I'd go straight to the computer and I would sit there for, like, two hours, and I'm like, I know I'm supposed to be here, like, hitting away at the keyboard with nothing to do. It took probably a good six weeks for me to actually get out of that mode and to not feel guilty about not working.

Thinking, you're probably. Even though if you weren't really working, you're probably thinking, what's next? What's next? I got to come up with the next idea. Like, I'm not working, but I'm thinking about the next idea. What am I going to do? How am I going to double up? Right.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's. There was a lot of real fear that kind of set in with, like, am I gonna be able to do this again?

Yep.

How am I gonna make money again? Like, a lot of that stuff's churning through your head. But I did wind up taking nearly a full year off. Nice. Which was great. I did a ton of traveling. I just did, like, lazy days where I get up at 9 o' clock and me and my dog would go to the dog park and it's the best. Go to the gym, just kind of hang out. But like I was telling you, I kind of. I hit this point where I had a realization that I had been chasing this money my whole life. It was my goal for so long to make a bunch of money. I got the money. I got this big wire transfer, and I came to the hard realization that I was just as miserable as I was the day before I got it.

Wow. And, you know, that's one of those things that a lot of people, they don't get it because they're like, well, that's him. He's probably got these problems that wouldn't be me, because that's. If I had that, I'd be totally happy. Right. Like a lot of people do, they think that that's. Once I get this, all my problems disappear.

Right.

And it's not necessarily true.

It's definitely not true. Yeah. I mean, I had a big realization that basically all my life, I've been everything I had been chasing, whether it was money, whether it was women, whether it was status, was all this stuff to really just kind of fill this hole inside of me of seeking approval because I overall felt like I wasn't enough. So that year that I took off, I went through multiple personal development programs. I did ayahuasca. I did a couple, like, LSD Mushroom things, Tony Robbins day with Destiny. And then later, I ended up working with Brent Charlton, who you know as well. And Brent really kind of helped me dig into what that kind of the deeper underlying causes of all this was. And like I said, it was really more just me chasing approval more than anything.

I think that's one of the more common things for entrepreneurs. I was having a conversation with somebody else yesterday. I think it was one of my business partners. And we were really talking about that. How when you look at some of the most successful people, a lot of times there is a big chip on their shoulder of I'm trying to prove something to somebody. And usually I'm trying to prove it to myself because of one reason or another. Because we feel not good enough or we're defined by our success and what we can do. And it's not even about showing off. It's just about, like, either I'll show them who is the nebulous them, or I'll show myself. And it's interesting. I've got some of that. I don't have it in a big, big way. Like, as a driver, I sometimes. And this will sound funny, but I sometimes have gotten jealous of people who've got more of a chip on their shoulder or something to prove because I know it. It can drive you when things aren't going well. And it. Because it's this, like, fire, this anger that'll push you through, say, screw it. I'm just gonna bust out and get that done. And I've got a lot of ambition. And I. I'm still trying to impress people. Like everybody is. I mean, it's really hard to get rid of that ego. But sometimes I felt like if I had more, I'd be more successful because I would drive harder. And this is kind of a weird thing, like, mental chatter that I've got going on sometimes thinking, man, I almost wish I had more trauma in my life too. And I was like, careful what you call in. Brad, shut up. Quit that. Cancel. But it's funny. So Brent, who is amazing because I've also done his training. So he really helped you find peace inside. Is that true?

Yeah, he helped me. Really. Probably the biggest thing is a opened my eyes to everything that was going on because I was just completely naive to all the sh. T I had going on. Like, yeah, he really has. And really, this last, I don't know, a year and a half that I've been working with him just has been a lot of ups and downs. And me just kind of realizing a bunch of stuff and what I was really after and what I've been missing, but kind of my big thing and you kind of touched on this was everything for me was really like, more, more, more. There was never any, like, I'm okay with what I'm doing now. And I think that's a huge problem for a lot of entrepreneurs where it's like, I'm kind of at a point now where if I know what I want to spend money wise and I kind of know where I'm at in terms of that, where I'm like, if I make an extra million dollars this year, it's not going to change anything. And if I have to go to the point of beating myself down and working an extra 20 hours a week to make that extra million, it's not worth it to me because I kind of know what I want, I know what I'm going to spend. I know the lifestyle I have right now. And if I make it, like I said, if I make an extra million, if I make an extra 2 million, it's really not going to change anything. That's probably been one of the biggest things is getting away from that, Just constantly striving to have to do more and more and more and just being a little more realistic and okay with. Yeah, you're doing pretty damn well already.

Yeah. And it definitely, it helps to have that kind of FU account in there. Right? It helps to have that. And not everybody can achieve it, but it's like right away. Not everybody can like take that attitude. But they can because when they realize that like stop chasing the money and the success for the wrong reasons. And I know we've all kind of done it. It's funny, you brought up something that made me think about the. I'm kind of the same. I haven't had the big multimillion dollar exit or especially into my bank account, but I've done well. Right. And I'm at that place where in my life I've engineered a lifestyle that is pretty much exactly what I want. I can get a little bit better, but it would be really hard for me to achieve what I consider transformational. Things are good and I'm knock on wood. So if I had a big payday of, let's just say a six figure payday, which I get, but if I had something like that, it wouldn't change the daily life either. So I get that you're talking about. And it's interesting when that happens, when you're like, okay, yeah, if you put Half a million dollars in my bank account. I would love it. It'd be fantastic. I might go have some fun with it, but it wouldn't change everything. And then you go, well, so now what? What do I work for? How do I, you know, where do I put the target on the why I want to make this money? What have you identified now? Like, so on the businesses and like you do a lot of consulting now and on the businesses that you either have now or might start, what are the criteria that you choose to say? I'm going to do this not just for the money, but because of X. Have you replaced that? Because I doubt that you just depleted all your ambition.

No, no. I mean, I've come to the realization too that I'm still very much a driven by money person, which a lot of people don't want to admit that because especially with how we live today, where everything's very much purpose driven and everyone's very. A huge fan of talking about purpose driven stuff and all that.

Move out to Southern California where I'm at. You can't hear centered entrepreneur.

Yeah, I've come to the realization that I am very money driven. I'm money driven. And then I'm also. The big thing I really, actually really enjoy is helping younger entrepreneurs and younger copywriters. Because I think back to kind of where I was. I had one or two mentors that really did help me, but I wish I kind of had more. So that's actually one of the things I took on right away after I had my exit. Two of my buddies who wanted to get into Internet marketing literally knew nothing about Internet marketing. They were like, just kind of working regular jobs. They're like, how do I make money online? I was like, okay, let me think of the easiest thing I could teach you that you could start making money quickly. And the thing I came up with is like, all right, I could probably teach you to write emails. And I was like, I get businesses all the time asking me for email writers. I was like, I think if you bust your ass and write a bunch of emails, I bet within like three months I could get you a client. And neither of them believed me. They thought I was like, crazy. Like, there's no way I'd be good enough to do this. And I put. It was funny because I put them on this program where they literally had to write three emails every single day. And I gave them feedback on them. So I give them like a product. I'd be like, here, take this product off clickbank and write an email about it.

Did you give them any training on that?

Yeah, so we did training and then I would literally give them feedback on literally what they wrote. So along the way they were getting feedback. Like I said, I wasn't getting paid for this. It was more just my two buddies and it was more to me, a quest to see if I could do it. I was kind of curious to see how far I could take them. And this was probably a year and a half ago we started. And now one of them is going to make probably about 80 to 90k this year. The other one's going to make probably 120 to 130k this year, literally simply from starting from emails. And it's pretty crazy to me to think about that because when you compare that to. I went to college at Ohio State for four years. I was a sport and leisure study major. I did not learn a damn thing that I use today. The fact that I could teach them how to write emails in three months and they're on pace to make six figures is pretty mind blowing.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So speaking of some of the business stuff, now, let's talk about. I want to transition. I love talking about the journey and I love talking about what goes on in between the ears. But I also don't want to waste the opportunity to have a guy who's really just a master at cold traffic and making things convert. And I've got a lot of friends who are like, man, Justin's advice helped really make this offer work where it was marginal at best. Let's talk about right now with cold traffic. And I know this is. It kind of depends on the market, the product, et cetera. But let's talk about some stories about what's really working now. What are some of the. Maybe the mistakes people are making and maybe some of the bigger opportunities to really look for at the moment.

Yeah. So, I mean, I would say the biggest thing everybody comes to me with right now by far is Facebook. Everybody wants to scale on Facebook. It's a lot easier than. It's less. Everybody's more familiar with it.

Everybody ends up forgetting Google and YouTube and ads and all this other stuff. They're like, no, it's just Facebook, nothing but Facebook.

Yeah. So, I mean, everybody wants to scale on Facebook. And if you're in any of the big niches that are tough to run on Facebook, so health, financial, make money, online dating, you're running into a problem because what you could do even a year ago where you could write a VSL or have a copywriter write one and then use that for Facebook and use that for native and use it for affiliates. That is completely over. You need literally a completely different funnel for each one because they each have different compliance regulations. So what we're doing a lot of now today is basically what I call watered down direct response. Taking those hard hitting sales letters, watering them down, not only just watering down the copy, but watering them down in a way that when the 22 year old Facebook compliance person who's approving your ads looks at it, they don't feel like this is a scammy direct response offer. I've realized that's probably one of the biggest things that people don't realize. It's not just the words, it's the feeling they get. And does this feel like a bright and cheery and kind of real thing, or does this feel like something that's trying to make me feel ashamed because I'm fat and I'm out of shape and stuff like that? So I'll give you a couple examples. People we work with in the health niche that normally have very fear driven video sales letters have really replaced those with much more positive and like personal stories. And those are working really, really well. And they're shorter and the copy's not as hard hitting and the videos obviously not as like you can't like force them to watch a VSL like you would on email. But the big thing to take away there, and this is actually hard for copywriters emotionally to let go of because you look at it and it's like, I could make that copy so much better. But the reality is, if it works and you're able to scale it, who the hell cares if you could make it 30% better? Because the reality is all you care.

About is because you could make it 30% more persuasive. But if it's not going to get shown to anybody because it violates compliance and it doesn't get approved, then why it's not even worth it.

Yep. Yeah, I've been beating the drum this year big time on compliance. Trump's conversion in 2019, which is a big difference and a big change. Like I said, even from where we were six months to a year ago, everybody's kind of scrambling to try to figure out how can I get this back on Facebook, how could I run this on Google Display or whatever? And it really is, it's all about compliance. And I think, like I said, it's about the two things. It's about watering it down and you can't really dig into Facebook is huge against anything making the readers feel bad. It's got to be much more positive and cheery. And you can kind of get away with a little more if you're telling a personal story. So, like, instead of like, you digging in and being like, is your back pain leaving you crippled on the couch? And you can't play with your grandkids and do your normal walks. But if you told your own story with that same stuff and let people connect with that, they tend to be okay with it.

And, well, the other thing, another angle there, you can kind of do the same thing, but talk about how great it may not have the same exact punch, but talk about how great my back feels like it used to feel. It used to have those issues, man. I just. Can you imagine having a back that just feels like you did when you were 22 years old, where you could bend over, pick things up right to where it's. Now you're doing the same thing, but you're talking about the positive spin of it versus the negative spin. And it can create. It can still trigger their imagination, but it doesn't trigger the compliance feel of, oh, look at this guy trying to beat this person down.

Yep.

In the Facebook side of cold traffic, because there are multiple things with cold traffic. So there's obviously, let me just kind of, as I'm jotting this down, there's the Facebooks, there's obviously search and display, there's native, and then there's email, and obviously there's more types of cold traffic. But I think those are kind of the big four that a lot of people are pursuing these days, like social search, native, and email. Of those, and I know it depends maybe on the product that's being offered, is there one that you typically start with to get kind of the. Whether it's validation, get the biggest bang for your buck, et cetera.

Yeah. So the one thing I'm a huge component or huge fan of is testing stuff in email and then replicating that everywhere else.

Right.

Especially if you have a decent sized internal email list that you can test on. So I'll give you an example of this. Mark Stockman and Jeff Raditch, who run a company called Natural Health Sherpa, super successful guys, two of the smartest marketers I know, they have their copywriters in one of my training programs, and they showed us actually an example of. They tested a bunch of stuff through their email and they found out that the words hormonal, weight gain gave this huge Bump in conversions instead of just using regular metabolism issues or weight gain or stuff like it was literally hormonal weight gain. They figured that out just from testing in their internal email list. And what they did was they run a bunch of quiz funnels and they went to their quiz funnel and replaced the words they were using there with hormonal weight gain and they got like a 22% bump in revenue just from that. It was like a three word change. That type of testing, testing angles, testing words in email, especially if you have your own email list and then taking it to somewhere else is so easy and it works so well.

It's pretty, it's funny. One of the more effective strategies that I used with a previous client, guy named Kent Clothier who has a software that called Find Motivated Sellers. Now he actually has a different name to it at the moment. But when I was helping with his marketing, one of the things we did is immediately after somebody purchased the software on the thank you page, before it even redirected him to the login, it says thank you. Your login is being, you know, you'll be able to log in. Next, please answer these two quick questions. And they were mandatory, but they were easy. Number one, how did you find us? And that's good information to know, but tracking took care of that. That was more of a softener question. The second question was, why did you decide to invest in this program today? And we tried to get them at their peak emotional state so that we could get some stuff. And man, I cannot tell you how many golden nuggets of email subject lines and pieces of copy. I remember the one that was the big mover for us was somebody said, because I'm tired of killing myself trying to find motivated sellers. So immediately we turned that into, I turned that into a email subject line that just said, tired of killing yourself trying to find motivated sellers and bam. It was like, I don't remember the exact stats, but it was like a 30% lift. It was ridiculous. And then we started to use that on headlines and graphics and other stuff. It's amazing. Just like listening to the market. But that, that one little tip right there for anybody else listening is right when they buy, get them right in that peak emotional state and they'll tell you why they bought. So I love that. So you'll test stuff out there, will you? Then typically if things are starting to work in email, will you typically go look for other email sources you can buy and really kind of hit that before you go, like on social advertising et cetera well.

So one thing we're helping a couple people do now, and this is working really well, is testing angles in email. And then if they work in email, we take those straight to Facebook ads.

Yeah.

So there's a direct correlation of angles that work in email. They end up just working fine. They work just as well on Facebook. So yeah, if you find angles that are, that are getting great response in your email, like literally those exact same angles. Like a friend of mine, Shaun Hadsall, who's in the fitness niche right now, they tested one in email that did really well. They do have like a hormone type diet for women and a lot of their positioning is around like it's contrarian. It's like avoid keto if you're over 40 and stuff like that. Really good tapping into going against what the trend is because everybody's into keto right now. And that worked really well for them in email. And now they just literally just transplanted that same thing onto Facebook ads and it's kicking ass over there.

Oh, that's great. As far as the funnels go in there and what's going on with. There's a lot of, there's a lot of different strategies on this. But I'm curious to what you've been doing and seen working better specifically with Facebook because that is one that I know a lot of my listeners are really interested in. So the ad copy to are you sending them to opt in Pages, VSLs, Long Form Sales letters combination different. Like are you seeing anything especially with today's compliance place that's working better than others?

Yeah. So it definitely does depend. But the large majority of the people that I help with Facebook, they're going straight to a sales page and they're usually selling some low ticket anywhere from I don't know, 9 bucks, 40 bucks type thing that tends to be what you working the best. And then you also have the even lower than that which would be the free shipping book offers and that a couple people who are doing higher stuff where they're sending to an email and then putting them on webinars and stuff like that. I'm personally not, I'm not the guy to talk to about webinars. It's not expertise of mine but I'm a huge fan of like literally just sell them something right now, get them on your list and then like let's make the money on the back end.

Right. Have there been any really, really sizzling hot back end monetization strategies? Whether it's an upsell strategy or continuity Based stuff that you've kind of helped implement on the back end that's made big differences because oftentimes actually almost all the time is that's where the money is made, is in the back end.

Yeah, so my, yeah, really my expertise is definitely in the funnel stuff. And actually on one of our calls in one of our coaching groups the other day, I actually just taught kind of my. For the first, I put almost 90% of my effort into the first upsell. Because if you look at any of the data, that's where about 80% of the income and the upsells come from. Especially if you're doing a free plus shipping offer that's literally the holy grail. So we're gonna make it work. So I have basically. I'll give you. There's three formats I use in terms of what works for the first upsell. These are literally repeatable across every single niche. So the first one is more of the same. I'll give you an example. They bought a three day worth pack of survival food on the front end for 10 bucks. A free plus shipping offer. The first upsell is now a three month package for 400 bucks or 500 bucks or whatever. So you're literally, you sold them a small pack, now you're selling the huge bundle of it, which makes perfect sense. Like people just want more of what they just bought. That's the first one that always works. More of the same. That works too as well with supplements. It works in financial newsletters where you bought a month, now we're going to sell you a year or you bought a year, now I'm going to sell you a lifetime. All that stuff works time after time. The second one is done for you any way that you could do whatever you're telling them on the front end, any way you can do it for them. So Kelly Felix, who probably one of the smartest marketers around, had a credit secrets offer that basically showed people how to repair their credit. And his first upsell on it was just awesome. It was this basically repairing your credit is pretty damn hard. There's a lot of shit you got to do and all these forms you got to fill out. So as much as you might want to do it, a lot of people probably don't do it because there's a lot to do. And him being the genius marketer that he is, their first upsell was literally a program called the automator that did like 90% of the work for you. Yeah, who the hell wouldn't want to do that? Yeah, so that's a great example of done for you. People love done for you. You can kind of do. And that kind of ties in with the third one. So my third one is anything that gives you quicker results. And this one you can kind of do a lot of different things. The classic one is an info product in the health niche and then you upsell them a supplement. And the supplement obviously here you can get great results following the program. But if you want to be like my top 5% of clients who get the best results, I recommend you take this.

Yeah, the information is good, but I mean, let's be honest. You want to take a pill? Yeah, because we do. We all want instant gratification. So more of the same done for you, quicker results. You made me think of something that's not a direct parallel. But my friend Gulliver Giles. Do you know Gulliver?

No.

He goes by the nickname Thor, Sales Warlord. He's a crazy Aussie, but he's one of the best sales trainers out there in thinking of the done for you because you know, people are buying the info but really we do want done for us. Obviously that's what quicker results and faster, easier, cheaper. But I always laughed because he used to have. I don't know if he still does. You download an ebook on I don't know how to be good at sales or how to overcome objections or something. And so you opt in or you buy it, it doesn't matter. And then immediately on the thank you page it said what you thank you, we've just sent it to your email. But what you've just requested sucks. Or the ebook you just got sucks. And it's a major pattern interrupt. You're like, what? Usually it's not if you buy it. I think it's an opt in. Like what you just requested sucks. Here's why. Because really you came here wanting to get the result and you got an ebook. And the problem with the ebook is it's general and it's designed for the masses but everybody's got unique problem situations, etc. And what you probably really need is somebody to talk to you about what, what you personally need and the gaps and how to over how to get from A to B. So that's why you can read that book and try to implement this or you can just jump on the phone with us and rip off the band aid and figure it out. And I'm paraphrasing, but I love the pattern interrupt of well, what you just asked for, frankly, sucks.

Interrupted me right it's ballsy, but it worked.

You can probably do that without using the word. It totally depends on the market and it also depends on your brand. But yeah, what you just asked for sucks. I'll see if I can find. If I can find it somewhere, I'll put it in the show notes and forward it to you. It was genius. But it really is a way. It's a slap in the face going, what do you really want? You don't really want an ebook. You really want to look good in a bikini. So here's the done for you. Cool. So are there any things that you're seeing that have been traditionally done by a lot of marketers in this space and just really are not working anymore and people need to kind of abandon.

Let's think.

And if nothing comes to the top of your head, that's okay. I know it puts you on the spot.

I can't think of anything of that. But I'll give you a couple ideas that I see that are working that are actually pretty non traditional. So there's a lot. Facebook really loves these kind of like ho hum, boring E commerce products. A lot of Facebook ad buyers I've talked to are like some of the best things we're scaling right now are just these super like the one guy I talked to is like selling plastic like gun holsters. Like just cheap ass gun holsters. And he's doing them as like a free plus shipping offer. And they're going to like a pretty E commerce Y style page. Like nothing.

I think I know which one you're talking about by the way, but keep going.

Nothing great about it. And apparently they're doing like thousands of sales a day and this guy's just building a huge list full of obviously people interested in guns and he's gonna sell them all kinds of tactical and prepper stuff on the back end and probably make a killing. There's somebody else doing the same thing with golf balls, like literally just plain old golf balls on a Shopify site and they're apparently just crushing it on return of ad spend. And now they're just building this huge list of like last I heard it was somewhere around like a million buyers who are obviously interested in golf. I've heard that from a couple people and I've heard about four or five different examples of it. And it makes sense because I was actually talking to Mike Geary about this and we were like, how the hell are they making that work? And we finally came to the conclusion that Facebook wants buyers like that because It's a better experience for the user. It's not a hardcore direct response page. It's a super basic Shopify thing. And he's like, they're obviously getting cheaper clicks. That's how they're making it work. So, yeah, that's kind of a thing I've heard whispers of and heard secondhand accounts from a bunch of people that are doing this and frankly, love the idea. I mean, it's a great way to build a series list.

Yeah, it's funny, I've got a little experience actually from. I don't know if it was. It may have been right around the time you were leaving, but I had a client partner where we promoted the Patriot Green stuff. One of my listeners, Brian, reached out to me to help, potentially help his brother. And his brother owned a business called Sneaky Pete Holsters. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but they made really nice custom gun holsters, et cetera. Had a great business and his entire business, he was doing three and a half million at the time or so. And his business, I was talking to him about how, where did you get your traffic? And he goes, magazine ads. I was like, great, what else? Magazine ads, that was like. And repeat buyers. I'm like, dear Lord, you're doing like three and a half million on magazine ads. He said, yeah. He'd never done Facebook, never done anything else. I was like, okay, so how many customers do you have? And he's 200,000. Like, all right, how often do you email him? He goes, well, Shopify sends him a receipt. I was like, and so no, nothing. So he had never done any real online advertising. He never emailed his list. So instead of offering to consult with him, I offered to buy his business. In the course of the due diligence. I ended up. We got really close. I almost bought it, but for various reasons. One of them, the biggest red flag there not to go too deep in the woods here, was that the magazine ads were experiencing fatigue. They were no longer working. And during the due diligence, he turns on Facebook ads and he's getting a 6 to 1 return on AD spend with doing them himself. He's never bought ads, he just throws up ads, literally markets it to the entire country. Just open ended.

Yeah.

And he's like, oh my God, this is great. I'm like, shit, I wish he wouldn't have discovered that before I buy this business. But long story short, now, all of it, by the time we got done with due diligence, all of his traffic was coming from Facebook ads. But it made me just super duper nervous having gun holsters and guns in holsters and ads, because in a moment, Facebook could just turn that off. And that was one of the biggest variables that made me decide not to do it. But then I did a partnership with him. I managed his entire email list. And I was like, all right, I want this percentage for any of your own products that we buy, But I'm going to go out and utilize this list to buy other people's stuff. So we promoted your stuff, we promoted other folks. And it did really well. Kind of when I smiled about the plastic gun holsters, when I was like, I think I know who you're talking about. Because I saw somebody do that free plus shipping offer.

I saw another one, like, two weeks ago. Somebody's doing free plus shipping with bibles. Smart. Like a Christian list. And probably make them bank on that.

Oh, yeah, I've always thought about that. There's an angle I'm working on now. I don't know if any of my listeners have any ideas or want to help, but. So I've got a client, and I won't mention who the client is, but they've got a really cool app in the fitness. I'd say it's in the fitness space. It does run, like run tracking. They do, like, run and workout tracking. So it's like, it'll measure your distance and your time, amongst other things. And it's all ad supported. But it's these really nice ads. It's all like, corporate sponsor supported. And I won't give a whole lot of other details away, except that he doesn't really sell anything. We have one thing that he sells, but we're really trying to find other ways to monetize this. And one of the things I realized is, like, all right, you get about 25 to 30,000 new downloads of your app every single month organically, and a couple hundred thousand people on the email list. He drove like 80,000 clicks in a month, like last month. Right. And I'm sitting here thinking, okay, so we are in the middle of strategizing the feasibility of this, which is, why don't we create a physical product off brand? Like, not his exact brand, but something that actually a secondary brand that he could have ownership of, I would have ownership of, and then we would retain the rest to probably give to an operator who kind of wants to run with this. We know a lot about the market and who they are, and we're trying to right now kind of brainstorm what would be the good physical products for like, runners and outdoor fitness? Not the total athletes, but, you know, kind of like the mom athletes, et cetera, that we could create. And we're toying back and forth with just general physical products for that versus a supplement like electrolyte drinks and just different things of that nature. Because we have this captive audience for free that we can just shove a whole bunch of traffic in front of to validate if they're going to buy it and potentially kickstart a product in that space. So this is real early of the product brainstorming.

One thing we used to always do, and I tell this to a lot of people, is basically we would test like every affiliate product to our list and just see what works well, and then whatever works the best, just go create like very similar one.

Absolutely, yeah. That's actually one of the things we're thinking of is saying, okay, what will they. What will these folks buy? Because I hate to let a good captive and growing like 25 or 30 new, thousand new people every month downloading his app. And he's not paying for it. It's just from discovery. I was like, man, I hate to let that traffic source go to waste. Let's leverage that to create a. A great brand with some real value.

You'll be sitting on some dough.

Yeah, that's one of the nuts I'm trying to crack. What's it not you're trying to crack right now? Like, what's. I mean, that could be people you're trying to meet, something you're trying to learn, somebody you're trying to hire, money you're trying to raise.

So my big goal this year is to launch my monthly print newsletter. I love writing. I write a daily email. We were talking about this a little bit before that. You're on my list. And my goal is to kind of expand that to a monthly print newsletter. I've actually written a couple already. I just wanted to make sure I enjoyed the process of doing it. And I actually really love it. And it's interesting because I truly enjoy reading them. Like, I get Dan Kennedy's and I get Ben Settles, and there's something about a print newsletter.

I agree.

It's an experience that you can't get online. Like my Dan Kennedy one comes and I like open it up and lay on the couch for 20 minutes and pour myself a drink. And like, it's just me in the newsletter for 20 minutes and I go through it with a marker and highlight stuff. And it's this whole Experience that it's almost like people who get their New York Times on Sunday morning and like, lay down on the floor and spread it out and read it while they're drinking coffee. Like, it's a totally different thing than reading something online.

Right here in my hands, I've got Perry Marshall's newsletter. I don't know if you got Perry's. I get the evergreen profits 1. There's a couple of my business partners, Joe Fear and Matt Wolf. Okay, yeah, I'm with you. Like, I like that physical thing. The other nice part about having a physical newsletter is you have a reason to put ride alongs in there and sell them more stuff.

There's opportunities like that. The one thing I really love is the simplicity of people getting it, being able to read it and they don't have to do anything else. Like, membership sites have so many hurdles because people just frankly don't ever log into them and look at the stuff. Yeah, they actually hurt your churn rate more than they help. Like, people, like, add them to things. And the reality is they actually hurt because people feel guilty because they don't use them. Whereas the newsletter, it's like they don't have to do anything except be at their house and it shows up in the mail and they read it and they.

Well, and plus, what happens? And I know, because this happens to me. I'll get it. I'll be excited. I'll kind of flip through it. I was like, I'll get back to this and I'll put it down on my table or my kitchen table or my counter. And it's always there. So it's like in eyesight as a reminder. So it doesn't just like live inside a membership site or inside my email. It's like a physical thing that it's like, oh, it's always like reminding me, hey, grab this, grab this.

Yeah, that's for me. That's probably my big. My big rock this year that I'm planning on launching in a couple months.

Is there anything you particularly need or want help with? Whether it's somebody fulfill that or anything else of that nature, Anything that.

No, I actually. I feel like I have a pretty damn good idea of how to do it and how to launch it, how to fulfill it, everything. For me, it's really just kind of getting the initial offer off the ground and getting that going. And my goal is October to launch that. So until then, I'm actually building up my email list a little more. So obviously, launch it. The launch goes a little better.

I love it. You mentioned there was a couple people, brand new, just getting started. And I was going to ask if you were going to tell somebody who's just getting started what to do, but I don't want to go that. That's actually, you hear that question a lot and I've answered that to a lot of people. I have a different one because I was talking to another friend of mine yesterday and this question came up because he said, I've got great savings. I got six figures in the bank. And he's actually a really smart marketer. He's got like an IT services business over here and he's got dabbled. He's had an E. Comm business. He's done a bunch of stuff, kind of a jack of all trades. But he's kind of trying to figure out what should I do next. I've got the cash to invest in some stuff. I know how to do all this other stuff. It's not a matter of knowledge. It's just a matter of what do I think is going to get the biggest juice from the squeeze. What advice might you give to somebody like that? They're not starting from. They can invest in their business, they can do something. But are there any opportunities you see, whether it's like physical product, E commerce or anything else that you would maybe. And I know this all depends on who that person is and their strengths, et cetera.

I totally, I would agree with that, that what is an opportunity to me might not be an opportunity to you or might not be an opportunity to him. To me. I'm very much at a point where I'm looking for something I truly enjoy doing. I don't have to be like super, super passionate about it, but I have to actually enjoy doing it. I have to be able to do it on my terms and it has to be pretty scalable. Those are kind of the big three things that I'm looking for right now. One of the reasons, like the newsletter really appeals to me, like it's infinitely scalable. I love writing and the monthly recurring income and all that would be great. And the amount of money I can make from it would be great. And I think it'd be super beneficial to the people who actually read it. So for me, I kind of run everything through those three filters right now and it really helps me weed out. Like I said, I have a notebook of 45 different ideas that I really want to do. And trying to narrow that down to what's my best use of time is it's the Hard decision because the more successful you get, the more opportunities there are.

Have you ever run it through kind of the like an ICE filter? I, C, E. So it was relatively simple, but it's like list out, let's say your top 10 ideas or top 50 ideas, put them on a spreadsheet. I mean, you can get more complex than this, but this is an easy one to do, which is in one column, put impact, confidence and then ease and then rate them from 1 to 10. Like, if this succeeds, how much of an impact will it have in your business, life, financial or whatever? And let's just say it's a 10. Like, if I pull this off, it's a 10. Like, let's just say it is. I got this physical product idea, I'm going to start it and blow it up and if it works, like, I'm going to get it up to $20 million and sell the whole thing. Because I've kind of done this before, right? It's got a 10 impact confidence. Well, you might have a lot of confidence that you could do it. So that might be like an 8 or 9 and then ease. Well, that might fall a little lower. That might be like a 6 or a 5 because you know what goes into it. You're like, all right, that's not just something you just kind of throw out there and do. So now you average that score and then the next one down might be, let's say I want to do the opposite of that. It might be just like high ticket, one on one consulting. So the impact, let's say you're charging $10,000 a client per month. Well, the impact on that might be a six. It's not gonna crazy move the needle. The confidence might be a 10 and the ease might be a 10 because you know that there's people who do that. And then as you start to just kind of go down the list and score them by impact, confidence and ease and then average them out and sort them, it can give you kind of a cool overall score to go, huh? Maybe that's the one I should do. Because it's got the best ICE score.

I feel like. Does Roland teach that? I feel like I might have heard him talk about it.

Yep, absolutely. And Roland didn't come up with it. I mean, this is kind of taught, this is overall strategy. But yeah, Roland's got a different version which also looks at the various profit levers. So it'll say like, if these are the big business ideas, does it activate one of the profit levers of. Does it help me acquire customers, retain them, activate them, et cetera. But yeah, this whole ICE methodology is kind of pretty general. But, yeah, I love Roland's framework on that.

Smart dude.

Yeah. I always tell him, like, roland, you're my spirit animal. Like you when I grow up. But anyway, that's been a really effective and easy way to just kind of sort through various ideas. This is one question that I've started to ask, and I'm going to be asking a lot more. So I've got a concept I call Cognitive Keys and Cognitive Keys. Have you ever read Dalio's book Principles or heard of it?

I've heard of it. I have not read it, though.

I kind of got this idea from this, where Ray laid out. He's the number one hedge fund manager in the world, and he laid out a lot of the principles that have been attributed to his success. And one day a few months back, I sat down. Well, first of all, I asked a bunch of my clients, why do you really hire me? What's the real value you get from me? And it wasn't, oh, well, you help us drive sales and revenue and this, that and the other. It's the way you think, your kind of innovative approach to problem solving and things. And I was like, that's cool, but I don't know how I think. Like, I've never codified that. So I sat down one day and I started writing out all these little principles, rules of thumb, mental models, quotes, just little things that I've kind of relied on in the past as a reminder that, yeah, this is like a tool. And I started to think of these as, like, keys that open doors and unlock doors of opportunity or open doors that get shut in my face. And, like, an example would be, I don't have to know everything if I can access the people who do. Right. It's just a real quick little cognitive key that just. I can go back to time and again. Is there anything in your life, whether it was a piece of advice you received, a framework for making decisions, a tool that allows you that kind of works like a skeleton key for a lot of stuff that you've ever relied on that has just provided you a lot of leverage?

Yeah, I mean, I would say within the business realm. Probably about four or five years ago, I heard Jenny Thompson, who was the CEO of one of the Agora Health divisions, say, we were talking about what kind of business we were in. We were doing a consulting day with her, talking about what kind of business we were in. We're like, oh, we're in the health business. We sell supplements. We do this. And she's like, no, she's like, you're in the customer acquisition business. She's like, that's the business you are in. And that stuck with me very, very hard. To the point where everything I teach now is very much about customer acquisition. Because I've seen when you put all the focus on customer acquisition what it does to a company, I mean, that's when you're bringing in 500 or a thousand new customers a day off, cold traffic, it changes everything on the back end. And the reality is you can always do pretty well on the back end. With B and C level marketing, you can't do that on the front end. The front end is really what takes the best people and the best ideas and the most creativity and all the testing to make work. But that thought that as soon as you take your eye off the ball of customer acquisition, that's when nothing on the back end works as well. So I'm a huge fan of talking to clients about that and really getting them to like focus on. I have a client right now who's doing like 35 million a year. He actually sent me an email like probably about a month ago and said, I wrote an email actually to my email list and he responded to it. And he's like, I gotta say, he's like, you talk about customer acquisition all the time. He's like, can you drill it into my head? And he's like, for the last four months we were so focused on this back end offer that we're trying to get up. He's like, we literally took our eyes off the ball. Customer acquisition. He's like, and a bunch of our numbers went down.

Yep, it's true. So I love that. So remembering I would say, like, if I was to define that as a key is just remember what business you're in. It's customer acquisition. That's fantastic. Well, man, that brings us to the end of our interview today. Justin, this has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed talking to you, getting to know you better.

Yeah, me too, man.

Friends thing for all my listeners if they want to follow you and get on your newsletter, which guys, I think you'll like this. Justin does not have the easiest newsletter to get on. You got to jump through a couple hoops, which I love and you should take note of. But Justin Goff, G O F f dot com. He shares a lot of fantastic advice on there. You've also got an event coming up here in Is it in Austin?

Yeah. So actually on my newsletter, here's a good marketing. So when we used to do radio ads, I found out at the end of the radio ads, the URL that we sent them to made a huge difference in the number of sales. So it had to be a catchy, like, easy one to remember. And so after testing tons of these, I finally figured out which one that works. So I actually went out and registered a domain to use when I do, like, podcasts and stuff and to tell people to get on my list. And it's literally justin123.com go to justin123.com then you can apply to be on the email newsletter.

I may have to do something like that because telling people go to Brad Costanzo and then I got to spell Costanzo is not fun.

Yeah, it's gotta be simple. Yeah. So justin123.com takes care of that.

Fantastic. Well, Justin, thank you very much for being a great guest on Bacon Wrap Business and for all of my listeners. I hope that if you have not hit that subscribe button that you will right now. And if this has been a valuable episode, reach out to Justin on social media on his website. Let him know. Let me know as well. Leave a review on itunes. I read them all and I appreciate every single one of them. By all means, if you guys ever want to get a hold of me with any ideas or questions, you can shoot me an email to ask bradaconrapped business.com and I will see you guys on the next episode. Okay, this episode is almost done, but our time together doesn't have to end. At least not yet. Subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode and head on over to baconwrapbusiness.com where you can find more bonus material and you can leave me a voice message with your question. If it's good, I'll read it on the air. And if you have a business problem you'd like my brain on, send me an email to ask bradacon wrapped business.com tell me more and I might be able to give you a second opinion on what's keeping you stuck. See you on the next episode.