Ezra Firestone: $18m From One Article, and The Big Changes Coming For Physical Products Sellers

Hey, good looking people and not so good looking people. I don't mean to discriminate. Welcome to Freedom Fast site. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. Here on the podcast we talk about building businesses and investing the profits because that is what I believe is the fastest and the best way to build financial freedom so that you can live life on your terms. Today we're going to be talking with my dear friend Ezra Firestone. Ezra is a master at his craft, probably the best in the world at what he does, which is really generating audiences independent of any one specific channel and building physical products brands around them. So I asked him to come on and talk a little bit about some of the changes that we both see coming for e commerce sellers in 2017. We both agree that the traditional private label way of doing things, especially on Amazon, is basically that window is closed and then it requires a different strategy. So this is that strategy. We're going to go through what that strategy looks like. The 12 months to 1 million plan that I have talked to for years is still completely viable, completely relevant. And we teach the exact way how to do that in our brand Builder Bootcamp, which you can check out over@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp. We've created over or helped create over a hundred millionaires or million dollar businesses through our bootcamp and our trainings and even some of our free trainings. People have reported back building million dollar businesses just from the free stuff that we give away. But things have matured for it requires now that focus and that, that, that viewpoint outside of just one channel. So Ezra and I banter back and forth about what that looks like specifically and tactically in 2017. So Ezra and I talk about how to use traditional Internet marketing strategies that you can use in your physical products brand. We talk about building a brand beyond just Amazon.com or whatever primary channel you're using. We talk about the change coming in platforms and some new opportunities that are opening up that allow you to make more sales and have a deeper connection with your customers and allow you to have, have more repeat customers and even higher priced products as a result of using them. And he talks about how he made $18 million from just one article. And it's a really basic article. You can look it up online. It's a really cool case study to see. This is a really fun one. It's one of the most fun podcast I've ever recorded. So please enjoy this chat with Ezra Firestone. This episode of Freedom Fast Lane is brought to you by Freedom Fastlane tv. Hey if you love what we do here on the podcast, you will really love what we're doing on the video show. Every week, we answer your questions and we look at a live business case study. We find out what they're doing well and what they can do to make more money and improve their profits. You can find it on facebook@facebook.com freedomfastlane. You can search for the hashtag ffltv or you can find us on YouTube. Just search Freedom Fastlane. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. I'm a little bit nervous about this one because I just became the second most handsome person talking on the podcast right now, and this devastates me. Ezra Firestone, thanks for hanging out with us, man.

Ryan Moran, the Chael sonnen, the Conor McGregor of our industry. I often. You don't even know this. Yeah, well, you're a very polarizing figure. You know, you're one of those guys who is, like, really willing to say some stuff that might be, you know, controversial, let's say. And it's incredible because there's not a lot of people who are willing to do that. In fact, I'm much, much less, I would say, controversial than you are in what you put out there. And I applaud you for it. I think it's really cool.

I want you to tell me, right, who doesn't like me because I need to go Conor McGregor.

Them. You know, I don't actually know because all the people in my mastermind, like, went down to your event and they were super stoked and, like, they really like your content. So my group is our fans of you. But I just imagine with the sort of, like, don't, wouldn't. Don't you see that in your Facebook ad videos and stuff that you post? Or people are like, yeah, but I'm.

All Grant Cardone fans, so.

Okay, well, there you go. Those people, they don't like you, man.

All right, well, fair enough. Or they didn't like my Bernie Sanders impression. Could have been. Could have been that.

I got to see that one.

Oh, well. Well, if he ever comes back, I'll let you know, Ezra, that he. That the people@smart marketer.com are hoarding all of the money from the rest of the Main Street Americans. I mean, I'm doing my hands right now.

Oh, man. Maybe we should talk about, like, marketing or something.

This is better.

So. Well, Ezra, you know, the. The reason I originally wanted you on is because.

New year, I made some predictions of what's going to happen in 2017 for physical products Owners and entrepreneurs. And one of the things that I think is finally going to have to happen is that a lot of the physical product owners who have been completely dependent on Amazon are going to see a couple things happen. Either they're going to get acquired, which is happening at tremendous rates, people are being acquired for a whole bunch of money, or they're going to have to operate like a big brand, which means getting into multi channels and that could be Walmart, Jet some other places. But I think it really means having their own audience or they're going to get swallowed up. One of those three things is going to happen. And you're one of the few people that I know that has been able to build an audience that, you know, you are. I don't know how much of your revenue comes from Amazon, but I know you're. I think it pales in comparison, about.

A million five of 22.5. So it's very small percentage.

It pales in comparison to what you do on your own. And so I just need you to set us straight and I have a couple questions to ask you, but really I just, I need to get everything out of your brain to help make that shift.

I'm super excited about this conversation and I think that we have this sort of. I find it very fascinating because it's similar to what I saw through Google search engine optimization and drop shipping, right? Like I lived through the wave of a business opportunity that was so easy to be a part of. I started as a drop ship retailer, man. My first million bucks was made dropshipping using search engine optimization and link building and Squadoo and hub pages. All this crazy SEO stuff like Squid back in the day. And that's when you know you're old.

Man, you know what Squidoo is.

But like, dude, that was the of that time of the 2005 era. Drop shipping was what you did and your traffic source was Google search engine optimization. And very similar to the way that private labeling is the business model and Amazon is the visibility source. That's what it was back then. And I watched this thing happen where it was a 10 year run or maybe like a seven or eight year run, where up until about 2011, 2012, it was like gold. It was super easy. Anyone could get in there. It started to get harder and harder as Google started to decide that they didn't love the way that people were manipulating their search engines for showing up for different queries and they started to make it harder. They started to introduce algorithms. And I see Amazon doing a similar Thing with this recent ban of doing those big discount giveaway campaigns that everyone was doing with this recent. They don't love if you've got the same exact product from the same supplier as 20 other people. And I think we're gonna see this thing of it being a bit harder to launch. If you don't have some value proposition to the marketplace, if you're selling the same blacklight Flashlight as every other bum with a different label on it, I think you're gonna have a hard time.

Yeah, that's exactly what I've said. I just want to add one thing that, you know, the discounts are still fine. It's the discounts in exchange for reviews that are our problem. Just, I know somebody's. Somebody's gonna hate Ryan if I don't make that clarification.

Yeah, no, good. Thank you.

But I totally agree that the idea of kind of white labeling just to white label is over. Like if you're not adding some sort of a new value to the marketplace, just throwing up the same Chinese jump rope.

And that's not to say that you can't do it. People are gonna do it, they're gonna make some money on it, but it's not going to give you that. I look at Amazon as cash flow because it's like, it's cash flow. It's not a business, in my opinion. Right. Like you are built your house on Amazon's land, they can come kick you out anytime you can get negatively downvoted by people. It's great cash flow. It's cash flow you should take advantage of. And my very strong viewpoint is you should leverage that cash flow to build a brand, build your own community.

Yeah. It's like, it's the greatest possible way in the world to fund building an actual business. People are trying to use it as the business without successfully making that pivot. So.

And they feel overwhelmed. I've noticed because I get the opportunity to like engage with a bunch of these folks through my marketing blog. And what I constantly find is that people feel a bit overwhelmed because with Amazon, it's acting as both your visibility source and your platform. So it's like where you put your product up, it's where you put your sales copy, it's where you collect the money, it's where you do your customer service. And so when they look at like building a physical product brand off of Amazon, it feels daunting because there's all these different platforms involved where you're getting visibility from social networks and you're taking money on Shopify and you're doing customer service through Zendesk. And I find that like, it's really a technology hurdle that people have not really so much an understanding of how to do it, or rather not how exactly, but what they need to do feels overwhelming because the, you know, need to engage with so many different platforms to make it happen.

So let, let's talk about that. And I'm curious from the strategy perspective because I know so many people who come to me and they say, ryan, I want a funnel. I'm like, oh, you do, huh? And then, and, and then like a year later they're like, buzzword. Yeah, exactly. Then they come back and they're like, I lost all my money in funnels. And then they come back and like, Ryan, I really, I want SEO. Oh, you do, huh? Yeah. And then they come back like, I lost all my money in SEO. There's like this channel hopping that happens.

Yeah.

And then they're like, I think I'm just gonna stay on, stay on Amazon.

Which I get a good way to frame that, Ryan. That. I think a good way to frame it for people is Amazon is query based visibility. Right. People are typing in queries and they look for a dog bowl, they find a dog bowl and then they buy the dog bowl. And the, you know, e commerce world that I came from with Google SEO was also query based visibility. And I'm gonna drop another lingo word on you. We had to make a pivot. Oh, damn. Pivot. That's a new one. That's 2016 or 20. Yes, like middle 2016. That came around. We had to make a pivot and, you know, modify our strategy for non query based visibility, such as Facebook traffic, such as Instagram traffic, such as Pinterest traffic to a degree where people are consuming content, they're reading the magazine of social, of a social network, and you have to interrupt them with an ad rather than them actually searching for a product. And I think that's where people kind of start thinking about funnels and getting all confused, but it's really just in relationship to how you're engaging with the potential prospect in a conversation. If they started with a query based search, it's easy to sell them something. If they didn't start with a query based search, it's a little bit harder. And that's, I think, like a good way to frame that, you know, I.

Think that's a good way to frame it too. And I would add to it that the market's a lot bigger when you're not just going after the query based browsers. It's it, it's a longer process and people are not used to that longer process. They're used to like I put something up and it makes sales and it's profitable from day one because that's what happens when you rank for a keyword. So it's a longer process. But the market is so much bigger.

How, so much more opportunity. And, and I want to know how.

You, how you go into that. Like you have, you've got a nice team, but it wasn't always as big as it is. And you work with a lot of one and two man shows. What's the way that you're getting those individuals to start dipping their toe into what I would consider real marketing?

Yeah, I think you can still really do this. And I think a lot of the way people are successful by the way, is you slap up. Look, anyone can build out an E commerce store on Shopify. You can go get a free theme, you can Google. There's information on my blog like how to, hey, you need some things called more information pages like about us, contact us, privacy policy, shipping information. Some of these like you know, you know, pages about your brand. You need your products on there, right? You need like a shopping cart, you need a way to take money. Like the infrastructure of the platform where you're going to collect money and subscribers. Right. Having an email CRM connected like that stuff, I don't think is really what's perplexing to people, right? I think what's perplexing is how do you get people there and then actually get them to engage with you. And a lot of people who are being successful right now are still leveraging the going directly from social network to product offer page. And I would say if it's your first time ever, if you're going out there, you're a one or two man or one or two woman show and you're trying to like, you know, build a brand off of Amazon. You're gonna have to spend money on advertising, right? And just like anything else, you get better at it over time. Dude, the skill set that I think that people, this one skill set I think you need as a human being is the skill set of mastery, which is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area over time. You pick up an instrument for 30 minutes a day, you're gonna be better at it in six months. The same thing goes for advertising. People quit way too early. They're like, oh, that didn't work and they quit and it's like, no, give yourself six months, give yourself a year, you gotta get in there. It's like learning a language. It's sort of nebulous at first. And so I would say the best strategy would be to create a video that demonstrates the ownership benefit of your product, shows the product in use, shows why it solves a problem that the customer might have, talks about the benefit of having that product. Put that video on Facebook, amplify it to people that you think are most interested. And by the way, if you want to give yourself the best possible chance of success and you're on a small budget, narrow the geographic region to New York, California, Texas, Utah and Pennsylvania. Those are going to be your five best states for selling stuff physical products online. So narrow your geographic region to those states and guess what? Go even deeper than that. Only target people on iPads. IPad is like by a 10x, our most profitable device. So if you say you're going to create a video, demonstrates the ownership benefit, links directly to a product page. Obviously you got to have good pictures, you got to have good sales content. The website has to look good, you know what I mean? Like you got to have a decent offer page. But if you have a really kind of well done video, which is easy to get these days and you're targeting really, really, you know, the most. If you listen to Digital marketer actually puts out a really great podcast called Perpetual Traffic, I think that goes kind of deep on the Facebook ad strategies. It's like as good as a lot of courses out there. It's really good. And if you listen to that, you target really narrow and you run some ads, you spend 10, 15, 30 bucks a day. I would be very surprised if after time you weren't able to figure out how to drive sales. I would really be surprised. It's just that people quit too early.

And if you want even one more shortcut to that, I found that customers make some really good videos for exactly that because they just talk about their experience. And if you've got superfans, have them talk about why they're super fans and how the product made an impact on their lives.

Totally.

That's the thing that you just push in social media and some will hit and some won't. But that's kind of like the fast track to do exactly what we just.

Outlined what we do. And this is in my, I have this video ads course and what we talk about in there, not to plug my own stuff. Sorry, you can cut that. But one of the things that we do Is we incentivize all of our buyers to shoot a video review on their iPhone. So we send them an email after they buy. That's like, hey, do you want a $25 gift certificate to our store? Here's what we want you to do. We want you to pull out your phone, you know, shoot a video of yourself, you know, make sure it's horizontal, you know, 20 to 90 seconds, showing our product, showing your face, smiling, answering these three questions, and then email it to us and then we'll give you your gift card. And we use those as ads. We use those as social proof on our offer pages. They've been like super valuable to us. Those, those social proof videos.

And when you are advertising those and you're putting them into the Facebook sphere, where are you sending them to? Are you sending them to a checkout? Are you sending them to more content? Where are you sending them?

Well, for the most part what we're doing is advertising to articles. But I would recommend that you don't start with that. You recommend going directly to an offer page of the product. But the way that we do it is I'm a big fan of sort of meeting people where they are and what's something. It's like the way that people consume the digital medium has fundamentally changed since you and I got online. Like, it used to be that people were at desktop computers and they had to be stationary when they were, you know, consuming the digital medium. And so people would consume for longer periods of time. They'd be like spending an hour or two in front of the computer. Then we got laptops and that went down a little bit. And then now we have mobile phones and people are like consuming in little short periods of time all day long. They're on the toilet, they're in the line at the bank, and they're consuming mainly through touch based engagement. So touch based consumption of the Internet has eclipsed traditional laptop and desktop. So people are just kind of on their phones with their thumbs. And so because that's the way that people are consuming, the way that we like to do our advertising and our funnels is sort of in line with that where we amplify content that people can consume in the form of articles. And oftentimes we're amplifying those, those articles with a video ad on Facebook. So we've got a video ad, someone can watch that video and then if they never click the video, they don't even make it to our article. So then we retarget them and say, hey, you didn't you know, get to the article, check it out or if they consumed a bunch of the video, let's say they consume like 50% or more. Because by the way, we do three to six minute videos in our ads. Because that way if someone, like, if someone consumed three minutes of sort of facetime with my brand, I'm going to try to sell them directly. I'm going to say, hey, go check out my product. If they consume like a minute or two minutes or under 50% of the video, I'm going to advertise to them a link to go read an article about my brand. And then that article sort of alludes to a solution and that solution is my product.

Yeah, that's perfect. You said I was in the audience at content and commerce when you said that, that I'm going to butcher your quote. But basically the greatest top line piece to leads and sales is an article.

And I think so.

And rocked my world because I was like, isn't that so 2009? And I was hoping you would comment on that.

Yeah, well, so here's what I think. I think that like you end up with a longer sales cycle. Like you're like you mentioned earlier when you amplify content, right? So you put, you put an article in front of somebody but, and they may not buy right away, but if you retarget those people and say, hey, you consumed, you know, stayed on my article page for five minutes but didn't buy, check out my product, you end up with overall a better cost per acquisition because the people who do consume the entire article and then move on. Because the job of the article is to engage a prospect in a conversation about a problem that they are facing. Like for example, my best one is five makeup tips for women over 40. Because all the makeup out there is designed. All the cosmetics, the way they're selling it is like anti age, anti wrinkle. You know, you're screwed if you're aging. Tox yourself. Look, I'm not again, I mean I am against that, but like the way that, so we've got a piece of content that is a little bit controversial. It's a little different. It's like, hey, maybe you don't need to do all that. And so we have, and so we end up creating a conversation with someone that if they get engaged with it, they are rabid fans. It's like the people who consume the videos you put out, like if they watch five minutes of your video and they like your, the conversation you're having and then you Follow up with them with an offer for something, they are so much more likely to take it because they're actually fans of yours. It's not just buy my shit, it's hey, let's have a conversation about something that you're experiencing. Because what we do is we touch on collective experiences. We look at groups of people who are all having a similar experience and we try to relate with them about that experience. And then once we've had some form of relation about that experience, we then make some kind of an offer that we think is relevant to that conversation that we were having with them. And it's like one of the things that I do in my information publishing business is I have these blog videos I put out on Facebook. They could sometimes be up to like 40 minutes long if it's a Facebook Live, or they could be three minutes long. I create an audience inside of Facebook of anyone who's consumed 75% of one of my videos in the last 14 days. And those people then see ads for different offers that I have. And that is my most profitable ad group inside of all my Facebook ads for my information publishing business is the people who engaged in the last 14 days with 75% or more of one of my blog videos.

Wow. And are you doing most of that traffic driving and retargeting on Facebook or are you using other platforms too?

We use Instagram, Pinterest and the Google Display Network. But of the $5 million that we spent in 2016, about four and a half million was spent on Facebook and then about 500 grand on these other networks. And that's just because we are specialists in that platform and I do believe it to be the easiest self serve interface. So they've got the best technology that makes it the easiest to work with. But we're really amping up our skillset and diving into 2017 on the Google Display Network and on YouTube because Google actually has 10 times the reach that Facebook has. So there's a lot of opportunity on Google. It's just that the self serve platform like that you go in to use is a little bit more difficult and kind of funky. And we're just not as good at it, frankly. But we are working on it.

How have you found the launch process to have changed? Once you have all these email addresses and all these people pixeled and you have this firepower to be able to release new products, you're not dependent upon the queries what people are searching for. I know a lot of physical product owners that say I have this really great product. But people don't necessarily go and type in the specific thing that my product does. How do I get this out to the world? You already have all these eyeballs. How have you found that you've been able to leverage that with a new product?

So we. So a couple things that brought to mind for me, and I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent first, which is that for me, 2017 is the year of fragmentation. And what I mean by that is it used to be that I thought of my brand or my community as simply my email list. That's like what it was. It was like, okay, I got people on email list, I send them messages. You know, that's what I do. And then it became I thought of my brand and my community as people who were on my email address and people I had in pixeled audiences, I. E. They were fans of my Facebook page or they'd visited my website in the last 30 days or had uploaded a list of them of my subscribers to Facebook and were targeting them. So it was like I could target them with ads. Well, now I'm thinking of my brand and my community as, yes, email addresses, yes, pixeled audiences. But there's three additional channels that I've starting to see extremely good results from that. I think every brand, once they get to the point of, let's say 5,000 subscribers on their email list, should. Should implement. And then I'll answer your question, which was. I'm not answering right now, but I will answer it. So the other three channels are Facebook Messenger. So you can now build groups of people inside of Facebook messenger and send broadcast messages to them just like you would email. And We've got about 30,000 people in our Facebook messenger in your group. And the open rates are like 75%. So we're going to continue to build that. There's ad units. You're going to be able to, within a couple months, run an ad that says subscribe to my Facebook messenger, and then you can automatically message them in there. And we're already doing this thing where if someone visits our shopping cart but doesn't buy, they see an ad that says, hey, we noticed that you didn't purchase yet. We'd love to talk to you about our products. Click here to message us. It's actually an ad unit inside of Facebook where the call to action opens up a messenger and then we're getting them to live chat us and we're able to close sales that way. It's more valuable for high ticket offers. But we're using it for lower ticket offers as well.

Yeah, that's ads. I've heard that was coming down the pike. I saw it in my ads account recently that you could run ads to Messenger. I'm like, what the heck is this? And I even heard like, the guy running messenger is like a former Exec over at PayPal. And I'm like, what do you need an exec from PayPal to be running Messenger? I've been wondering what they were doing, but now that totally makes sense.

And check this out, dude. So they have, you know, now in Facebook messenger, you can send your friends money. So you can literally. So it's like peer to peer money, dude. Peer to peer money transfer. And so what they're looking to do is get everyone to put their credit cards on file so that you can run. It was coming. You can run one click to purchase from the newsfeed. I'm calling it integrated social commerce, where the commerce experience is integrated into the social network and a user can pay you right from one click from their newsfeed or one click from their messenger. Never have to leave Facebook. And that's happening. That's already there. Technology exists. It's rolling out in 2017. If you go into your Facebook fan page messenger settings, you will see the option to connect stripe or PayPal. And you can actually accept money in messenger today from customers. You can send them a money request through Messenger. It's crazy.

That is amazing. Sign me up.

You know, dude, it's nuts. I mean, this is like when we do our information launches of different, like, courses and things we have, we're going to be using that big time. The other two channels that we're sort of aggressive on right now, number one is desktop push notifications. And there's a company that we use called pushcrew.com and basically what it is, they put a snippet of code on your website. And then when someone comes and they're on a desktop or a laptop, it pops up this thing that says, hey, can we push notifications to you? Kind of like you would get a push notification on your mobile phone, but you get it on your desktop or laptop computer. They say, yes. And then whenever you send an email. So for example, now when I have a sale or I have a piece of content, I email people, I run ads to people about that piece of content. They see those ads on many different platforms and devices. I Facebook messenger them about that sale or piece of content. I desktop push notification them. So it's another fragmented channel. Of a group of people who are in a certain little segment. And our open rates on those are about 40%. We've got maybe 3,000 people on our push notification list at this point. And then what we just finished doing, and I think this one is huge, is, you know, any community, because you're dealing with people, man, you're dealing with a group of people. So any community is going to have people who are more and less interested in whatever the heck the conversation is, right? Like for example, I'm super into skateboarding, I'm super into Brazilian jiu jitsu, I'm super into Internet marketing. And I'd say as far as e commerce Internet marketing, that's like where I'm the most active in the conversation. I'm a super consumer, I'm a super, I'm super interested in it. And so I'm the kind of guy who would download a mobile app from a company. So what we did is we had a mobile app developed and I can give you the guys we used. They're amazing and they're only a couple grand. And this is like for a later stage in a company, if you're already a little bit successful and you've got some money to spend and you want to communicate with your subscribers even more effectively. So what you do is you run an ad to all your fans, subscribers and buyers that says, and I'm doing this for smart marketer Boom. Be friendly, Zipify all my brand says, hey, download our mobile app and you'll be able to hear from us. Whenever we have sales discounts, content, etc. And we will enter you into the chance to win $100 gift certificate to our store. We give away 10amonth. And so there'll be about 10 to 20% of your subscriber base who will actually download this mobile app. And that way whenever you have a new piece of content, you email them, you push notification right on their mobile phone, you push notification on their desktop computer, you Facebook message and you run ads about it. So now that's five channels of communication, five different segments of your community and your brand. And that's a little bit. So anyways, that's what we're thinking about in 2017 is how can we be more involved in this fragmented world? Because the average adult in America has two devices and a quarter of people have three devices. And the average person consumes from 194 different channels. Gmail, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. Like they've got news websites, so they've got so Many places that they're consuming that the more that you can show up, like these little levers swing big doors. We're seeing like just a 6% increase in deliverability of all of our stuff is huge for revenue because more people are engaging. Like their email feed just gets smashed by a million things a day. So if you also have a push notification, if you also have a Facebook message, you end up being able to re engage people in a way that you simply can't otherwise. I have forgotten your initial question.

You have all this media now as a result.

Right.

And all these different platforms. And my question was, when it comes to launch a new product, what does that allow you to do? And I asked specifically in the context of the person who says, you know, I just want to get my product out there to as many people as possible. Where do I go to get attention? You already have this attention.

Yeah.

And I think that needs to be built up over time. And we've talked about how it could be done. But how does that affect how you release a new product?

Okay, so two things. The first is if you're building a new brand off of Amazon and you're not giving yourself a minimum of 18 months of consistent attention and at least a thousand bucks a month of advertising over those 18 months, I think you're not giving yourself enough time and you're not putting enough effort towards it. So that's the one thing is people judge their communities and their brands way too early. I think a new offer, which you have to. You have to consider a brand being built off of Amazon as essentially a new offer needs 18 months. Second thing is what we do is we go out. So we've got like, we just launched two new products during the biggest sale of the year that we ever do, which is our holiday sale, which I do not recommend. It was a total disaster and nightmare. And we actually had to recall one of the. It was just, oh, my God, dude, we messed up real bad. Because basically what we do is we sell tubs of goo. Now it's like the best goo in the world, okay? You cannot get better goo than this. It's handmade, organic, edible, small batch. I mean, it's such good product, right? Well, we tried to release this foaming facial wash, which the ingredients are incredible, but like the.

What's the stuff called, the packaging, the pump bottles, it like foams through this thing and we ended up getting a bad round of like 10,000 units of this pump stuff, this pump bottles, and it ended up going out to our customers. And it didn't pump and it didn't foam and it was like, okay, we got to stick to tubs of goo, man. Like this trying to get fancy is not working for us. But anyways.

What we did was we went out to our community the way that we do, right? Email ads, all these different channels ran a traditional launch model, right? Some content saying this thing is coming, some content announcing that it's here. Sales page, you know, countdown timer, your traditional information marketing product launch for a physical product. And that's one thing that I do that I think we're going to start to see more of is I take what I learned from the information publishing, information marketing world and I apply it to E commerce. For example, if you buy something from me, you buy, you come and you buy my number one product, like 60% of my front end sales are from one product. So you come in and you buy that one product but you don't buy my second most popular product. You're going to end up on a webinar sequence about that second product. I'm doing a one hour long form video webinar about a $40 physical product. And it kills. Yeah, I'm using long form video content because long form video content freaking works, man. So why wouldn't I use it to sell my physical products? I can show you.

Just curious, are you sending that in the follow up sequence to buyers or are you driving leads to a webinar that sells?

I'm not driving leads. It's only on the back end. Okay, got it.

Keep going.

Totally on the back end. You buy something from me, you don't, you buy X but not Y, you're going to see ads for Y. You know, we do all this kind of bot. X but not Y is our number one advertising channel. Like it works really well. But anyways, so we do this sort of traditional launch of that. We also have found that Facebook is really freaking good at figuring out who are the most like your subscribers or buyers. So we upload lists of our subscribers and we upload lists of our buyers and we say create a lookalike audience of these people and then we. So Facebook will, you know what a lookalike audience is for those of you who don't know what it is? It's like Facebook says, okay, we're going to look at all these data points and we're going to take anyone who has at least 6 data points in common with one of your buyers and if they have at least six data points in common, we're going to Stick them in this list called a lookalike audience. And it's usually 2 million people. So what we do is we then filter that lookalike audience down by adding, we're saying anyone who's in this 2 million people that has six data points in common with one of our buyers or subscribers and is interested in skin care. So then that puts us to a group of like 300,000. Then we run ads to them and consistently for smart marketer, befriendly and boom, those are all our best top line or awareness or people who don't know about us yet. Ad groups that we're targeting.

And you're sending them to content, you're sending them to the same articles that you're sending to everybody.

Totally. Our content is all related to a sales funnel. So basically the way I look at advertising is in pillars and the way I look at my business is in pillars. So I've got three pillars. I've got what I call awareness and acquisition, which is people who do not yet know about me. And all of those people see content first, but the content that they see is very specifically crafted to relate back to an offer that I have. And when you're engaging with the article that I'm advertising to you in that awareness and acquisition pillar, in that article there's going to be links back to my products. Like it's, like it is a piece of content that very clearly relates back to trying to sell or offer my products. That's pillar number one. Pillar number two is the retargeting pillar. So that's, that's anyone who's engaged with my brand at any level and based on how you engage with my brand, you see different stuff. So for example, if you watch two minutes of a video, under 50% of a video on Facebook never clicked over, you're going to see an article. If you watch like four minutes of a video, five minutes of video, never clicked over, you're going to see a product offering. If you click to my website, made it all the way to the product page, but didn't buy, you're going to see a dynamic product ad. So the retargeting marketing pillar, the pillar of people who've engaged in a certain way but not yet bought, there's a bunch of different groups, a bunch of different segments of those people that are seeing different pieces of content based on what they consumed or didn't consume. Then there's the pillar I call loyalty. Loyalty is anyone who's bought and so maybe you bought X but didn't Buy Y. You're going to see an ad for Y. Maybe you bought a few months ago and never came back. You're going to see a different kind of ad. And everyone in the loyalty pillar, all of them, all the fans, all the subscribers, all the buyers, everyone who's in that pillar of. Has done business with me consistently every week sees a different piece of sort of random content that's not really relevant to a product offering. It's just kind of relevant to the conversation that my brand is having. So that's the content that's really not any kind of like specifically geared towards trying to sell something. But if you're one of the people who consume over 50% in the last 14 days of one of those random videos on Facebook, you're gonna see a product ad.

So first of all, that was beautiful. And second of all, it was a lot.

Yeah, sorry, dude.

But here's the thing. You've got a team that manages all this. And I'm curious for the person who is, you know, has a small team, how much is necessary? And number two, I'm curious what your team actually looks like. I think you actually have it all listed out on smartmarketer.com on like, who does what? Facebook.

Yeah, I got some videos. I have some very interesting ideas on team building that is probably as controversial as I get in this industry.

Trying to be more like Ryan Daniel Moran. But so, you know, I started as a one guy. It's so interesting. My experience of being like, of identifying as poor, right. Eating the school lunch and having all hand me down clothes and like not coming from any kind of money or wealth. And now on the other side of like 15 years of work, being in the sort of upper range of our class, you know, class thing, like the class structure of being like one of the more wealthy people that I know, it's been interesting. But so to talk about that, you know, you don't. You can get so much value out of one person. Oh my God. One person can like 5x your production. But I did it. All my stuff, I coded, I designed, I ran ads. And I think if you're gonna put attention on mastering one skill set in your business, I mean, it really should be advertising. I think it's such a valuable skill set knowing how to amplify your brand effectively. And it takes trial and error. And I think, you know, when you're just getting started, you've got to be willing to put a minimum of one of your eight hours a day into that. A minimum of maybe two, maybe Three, if you're working eight hours a day, you know, which I think hopefully, or maybe you probably are, if you're an entrepreneur, you're probably working six, eight, maybe more. You really ought to give it a couple hours a day. And then my team, you know, we break it down into. So it's kind of interesting now because now I have multiple brands and some of those brands. So let's look at Smart Marketer. Am I running on or is this okay still?

Dude, you're spitting gold. Keep going.

Okay, thanks. So let's look at Smart Marketer. Smart Marketer is my information publishing company where I sell information products and courses. And I have subscription and software and coaching all kinds of stuff. And that company actually sells marketing services to my other e commerce brands, which are actually different LLCs and escorts and stuff. So Smart Marketer, we have the copy team, which what I did was I went and my cousin was an aspiring screenwriter in Hollywood. He was trying to write movies and stuff, so he understood how to tell stories. So I took him and I was like, hey dude, look, I will teach you direct response marketing and you already know how to tell stories. And let's get you writing copy for my brand and my different brands. And so then he ended up. We ended up hiring his buddy who was also a screenwriter. And they consumed everyone's content. All the different copy books from Dan Kennedy. I put my people through courses. I have a Slack channel that is blogs that we should be consuming. It just populates RSS feed with each different post from all the copy blogs. And I make them spend two hours a week consuming content and making notes about different things we could be using. So I have that. I bring them out to events. I really invest in their education because I really think it's not about who I mean is about who you hire, but it's kind of about what you invest into them, right? Like how much you're willing to invest into your people. And anyway, so I've got my copy. I then have my design team, which is my actually only one guy at this point. We had a couple more and when he gets maxed out, we outsource some design. And I think that you should outsource design and development to start. And I'll tell you who I think you should hire first. So I'll continue with my categories of people. So I got my copy team, I got my designer, I have my ads team, which is really me and one ads manager. So I still am very involved in advertising. I really like it. I'm really Inspired by it. I kind of geek out in there and so I do a lot of strategy, but I don't actually do much implementation anymore because I've got my ads manager and this One guy in 40 hours a week is managing $5 million a year in spend. So one person can really do a lot with advertising if they've got support. If they're not also trying to build out all the funnels and build out all the copy. If they're just doing the advertising, they got a designer they can go to for ads they got, they can do a lot next. And this is who I think you should hire first. Outside of customer service. If you're still doing your own customer service, please get yourself a customer service person. I mean, come on, that's like number one, get someone else doing customer service. That can be done easily. So I've got a guy who's my chief platform officer and what he does is he manages all the software. So all the Shopify and GoToWebinar and Google Analytics and, and Klaviyo and Mailchimp and Zapier and every single piece of software that we use in the business, infusionsoft, he knows inside and out. He consumes all the content from their blogs. He's just religiously reading their blogs, learning about the new features. They are keeping his sort of hand in the, in the how shit is operating, how things are working, the infrastructure, the platforms that you gotta get yourself out of. When I got out of that stuff, it freed up and it freed up so much time. And so my chief platform officer was like my third hire and he has just like been a lifesaver.

So is that a term you made up, Chief platform Officer?

I think it is, yeah. I think a lot of people might call that the, maybe the chief operating officer, the technology guy, I don't know.

It also could just be your project manager who just understands all of the different platforms because that's where all of the pieces are really flowing through. That's how I see that. So yeah, you know, what you're saying is exactly right in line with what I've analyzed. Everybody who spoke at Freedom Fast Lane Live, who talked about hiring specifically Cameron Herald basically broke it into the same order of having like your most immediate tasks handed off and that would be in the physical products world, customer service, and then having that person who is just managing all of the different processes that are going on at one time that take up so much mental capital and can start to systemize that and then hiring sales minded people, the People who are going to be building out exactly what you're talking about or people who have relationships with the wholesalers or somebody who is in charge of driving revenue.

Totally.

And you're basically saying the exact same process.

Yeah. And you know, we are big enough at this point where we actually need a separate chief operations officer, project manager, someone who's managing everything that's happening, running all the spreadsheets, running the base camps, etc. So we've got two project managers and under our chief platform officer, under the guy who runs all the platforms is our developer who does all of our WordPress and Shopify development. So we've got one full time developer and he kind of works on the platforms team. So we have copy team, design team, ads team, platforms team, project management team, which is two people. Then we have our customer support and these are the people who are answering the emails, answering, answering the phones, answering the live chat. We've got four people on that team because we sell software as a service which requires a lot of support. So we got four people on that team. I have a part time video editor because we produce and edit a lot of video. So she works about 20, 25 hours a week doing video. I have a part time content marketer, kind of like a guy who works 20 hours a week and what he does is every time we have a new piece of content, he syndicates it all to all the social networks, he posts it to the blog, he emails it. So he just does the sort of bi weekly process of syndicating our content. Then our ads guy amplifies it obviously with ads and stuff. That might be everyone on Smart Marketer. Let me just double check. Oh, you know who else I have, and this is kind of what I was going to get to was that I've got a chief strategy officer where all his job is is to talk to me. That's it, that's all we do together, we just talk about strategy. He's a guy who started in e Commerce in 1991. He knows the industry inside and out, he knows all the companies. He's the only person in my company who really, really, really gets the whole picture of what's going on besides me. And so we just talk about strategy. And what I realized is that what I can do better than anyone else is create and strategize. I shouldn't be writing copy, really, I shouldn't be doing, I shouldn't be managing any of the platform, I shouldn't be doing any of the customer service, I shouldn't be doing any of the operations. I should really just be figuring out what needs to be done, figuring out the direction that we're going in, creating the content that only I can create and sort of passing that viewpoint onto the team and holding people, sort of holding that vision. And so my strategy guy really gives me someone to kind of just bounce stuff off who really knows what they're doing.

So we've covered where the puck is going in 2017. We talked about team building and actually executing all of this. I want to go full circle now and talk about, I know that you guys really grew a lot in 2016. What do you say are the biggest levers that you pulled in order to make that happen in a year?

Number one was having a lot more accountability. I'm really kind of bad. I'm not a good manager. And I was the manager and I was the guy holding everyone accountable and I was just doing a poor job of it. And so I invested in a very sort of monetary way in bringing on two full time people to just kick our butt and get us in order, get us in line, run spreadsheets, hold everyone accountable. And that has been amazing. And then the other thing that we did was we spent a lot more money on advertising. We created a lot more content. I think this idea, this is another thing that I sort of got going is that, that everyone's being like, you gotta create all this short form content, little snippets for mobile phones and this no long form content, long articles, five to ten minute videos, like that's what is going to engage a rabid fan base. You don't need any of this. I mean, fine, do short form stuff, but if you really want to do well in 2017, create a couple good. You only need one good piece of long form content. It works so well. So for example, let's take this application that I created for Shopify that allows you to do post purchase, one click upsells. What we did was we created a case study article, like a 2000 word case study article about why we created it, how we created it, what it does, how it's being used, and that one article is responsible for all the sales. We have several hundred thousand dollars in sales and so I think if you're willing to invest in one really high quality piece of long form content, it can do wonders. And you don't need a lot. This idea that, oh man, now I got to build a content marketing team and write all this copy all the time, produce all these videos, it's like no Do a couple really high quality things. I think that is going to be more valuable. I think long form content is going to continue to be what drives the bottom line of brands in 2017. And long form content really did better than what a lot of people are giving it credit for in 2016 as well.

That brings up a question I meant to ask you earlier, which is you're high on throwing a lot of content out there. I shouldn't say that that on pushing your content out there. But we all know that not all of it is going to stick. And by that I mean it's not all going to land with the right people. Not all of it is going to have the impact that you wanted it to. So a two part question, one, how do you determine what's landing and two, what percentage really deserve to be scaled? I mean if it's one out of five, I'm rolling that dice as often as possible, right? Yeah, I want that as much as possible, possible. But if it's 1 out of 200, then it's more like, okay, what are we going to do to maximize each piece from. For really having an impact?

So here's what's interesting metrics look like. Totally. So first of all, the way that we look at what's resonating is we look at Facebook comments and shares and likes and things like that. So the response to the piece of content actually on Facebook as well as the response to the piece of content in people emailing and messaging us. So we have different channels that people are communicating with us about. We have like live chat on our website, we've got emails, stuff like that. But it's really, we're kind of looking at the social sphere and how it's doing there. But you have to also understand that our content is created in these pillars and most of the content we create is in that loyalty pillar, that sort of directionless kind of just content for our brand, our community. Not as much going on, you know, trying to make that a front end thing that we advertise to acquire new people. It's really just about engaging and reselling people on our stuff. So 50% of our revenue in all of our businesses at this point comes from repeat customers because we create content that is relevant to the conversation that we're having. And in that content we also make different pitches for stuff we have. So that stuff in the loyalty pillar that's geared towards people who are already fans and subscribers is not near as important when we're talking about did it hit as the content that is designed to generate awareness and acquisition and new people. So that content, I think that, yeah, I mean you're probably gonna be in the spot of like 1 in 10 articles that really, really hits or 1 in 10 videos that really, really hits in that awareness and acquisition. But we in general only create like you know, maybe one every six months, you know, or every time we have a new offer. So for example, like, yeah, like you look at Smart Marketer, we probably put out five to six different things a year, maybe seven if you look at our events and stuff like that. And like some of our offers like our coaching and things like that are already set. So they don't need front end, you know, sort of pre launch or pre sell articles with boom. I kind of think maybe we got lucky. Like I wrote this article, you know, that has really struck a nerve. I wrote that five makeup tips article based on quotes and things that our brand was about and that article has struck a nerve in with wim. It just, just hit and I've not been able to replicate that. I've had other ones that have done really well and I would say I've been about one in 10 of the other ones. We've probably created 20 other articles and about two of them have done really well. But here's the interesting thing. If you're doing all of this, Ryan, if you're actually doing what I'm talking about, where you've got front end content that engages in a conversation and your awareness and activity acquisition pillar and then you're retargeting people based on how they consumed, how much they consumed, where they consumed, how far they made it. And then you're retargeting people based on after they bought and loyalty. It's hard to screw it up. It's hard to have it not work if you're actually taking a holistic view and looking at, you know, six months, all the people I put into my funnel based on how I retargeted them and then how I, you know, engage them after they already bought. Like you really can be successful without needing a, you know, super winning front end, you know, pre sell engagement piece of content that then leads back to your product offering. You really can.

So what I'm hearing you say is that you write one really good piece of content at the top end of the funnel in order to create awareness and to drive people into your funnel or your conversion process and then you're retargeting them and you're also adding different pieces of more engagement that also run into different sales processes and conversion processes. I guess when you write that top end piece for your event or for the physical product or whatever it is, are you then going out and boosting it to different audiences on Facebook and just scaling what sticks or what is that?

Absolutely, that is what we're doing. So once we have a piece of pre sell engagement content, that's what I call it. It's like before the sale, it's designed to engage and to sell and to get people into an open to buy model mindset and get them to click over to the offer page. I mean that's really the goal of it, right? Once we create that and we have like, you know, if you're selling information or software, it's likely going to be a case study, you know what I mean? If you're selling a physical product, it's likely going to be some kind of showing off the ownership benefit or someone's experience with the product, et cetera. Yeah, we go out there, we put it in front of people who we think it's going to resonate with and different audiences convert much differently. So we've got like we were targeting all these different high end department stores for one of our skincare brands and that was working pretty well. We were getting like $60 sales. People like coming in, clicking on the article and then.

Clicking over to our store and buying it was costing us about 60 bucks. We then transitioned to targeting like whole foods and all these organic grocery stores and that dropped to 30 bucks. It dropped in half just because we switched up who we were putting it in front of. And that's why I say couple, couple hours a day, man, one to two hours a day. Just focusing on advertising, getting good at figuring out who to put your messages in front of because there's so much option, everything. We just talked about all this crazy stuff with regard to amplifying a brand and things like that, like that level of intricacy, that level of detail, that deep of a well exists within Facebook advertising, it's like endless how deep you can go. Like for example, one of the things that we do. So check this out. This is in the loyalty pillar, okay? So if you come in, you buy and then I want to talk to you about long form sales pages. So just let's make a mental note about that. If you come in and you buy my best product, right? You came in, you saw my pre sale engagement article, you clicked through, you made it to the offer page for my best product, my number one seller, you then purchase that, you go on My post purchase automation sequence, et cetera. I'm then going to run a video advertisement to you that is for my second best product. And it's literally just the video that is on my product offer page. It's literally just kind of like the product sales video has a demo, talks about the product this and that. Now if you consume 50% of that video so you've now you bought once you came through, I got your attention on Facebook, I got you to buy, you bought X, you didn't buy Y, you saw a video on Facebook for y, you watched 50% of it. You are then going to see an ad in the form of a link that's showing off that product that leads right to that product offer page. I'm getting like $2 sales. Now. I might only spend $300 in a month on that particular little subset there, but I'm gonna make like 6 grand from that 300 and spend and I'm gonna do it every month and that's gonna be $36,000 in profit at the end of the year. That goes to my bottom line. So I'm like, I'm going to that nth degree of not, you know, not sleeping on the re engagement of folks who are in my community based on what they've done at every level. Even in the botx and didn't buy Y video. You're gonna see an ad based on whether or not you consumed XY amount of that video. So I'm just never stopping that process of like, let's communicate with people based on how they engage with us.

I actually took a bunch of notes on that one because you, I think you just made me a six figure bump on one of my businesses.

Thank you for that.

You want to talk about long form sales letters?

Yeah. So I also want to be clear that I really don't think I've got like the answers here. Like I'm just like, look dude, this is what's working for me. But I have another one of my brands where we're running ads. It's a skincare brand as well. I like to compete with myself. We're running ads to a straight up old school long form sales letter. It's an ad, it's a link ad. It's like, check out this organic skincare. And then it goes to this like crazy long with multiple images and headlines and sub headlines and copy and this and that sales letter. That's what it's doing. And I'm spending $400 a day to make $1,200 a day with that funnel. And basically what that is is it's kind of like the old school Amazon or Google funnel. I don't know if you call it a funnel, but it's just like ads to an offer page. And I'm targeting people interested in organic skincare. And then they're clicking over and they're seeing like this really long sales letter for organic skincare. And I'm not. I've not been able to scale that to the degree of some of my other brands, but that is working for me. And like, that's gonna do like 300 grand. It did like 300 grand that same thing in 2016. And maybe that could go better. I don't know. It doesn't give me the opportunity to do the kind of retargeting. Like, okay, they watch this video and then they didn't make it over or they made it to the presale. Like, it doesn't give me the same level of opportunity in the retargeting pillar as this, as this sort of process I'm talking about where we amplify an article and we use a video ad on Facebook. So there's more opportunity for re engagement in this other process I've been talking about. But we are making it work and it is like something that still works. So, like, don't come away from this recording thinking, like, you know, I'm saying that my, my way of amplifying articles is like the only way to be good. You know.

I usually spend this time asking a bunch of questions, but I think this is the first time that I was ever like, here's the question, now I'm gonna get out of your way for an hour. Dude, this was fantastic. Tactically, it's always so cliche to be like, I have a bunch of notes, but I really wrote a bunch of things that we're gonna implement into our business based on this. So I truly believe that the people who will win in 2017 are those who build big brands or at least the perception of having big brand. And that doesn't mean a lot of people. It just means the ability to, to take your customer down the life cycle. Right. To be able to serve them rather than just being like, thanks for buying. Buy next, please.

Totally.

And I really think that's a person who wins because they can buy more media. They have a deeper experience with their customers, which means they're going to leave more reviews, which means they're gonna subscribe and save more, which means that they're going to tell more people about it, which is how all channels eventually are normalized by those, the people who do that really well. And I think that's the danger and the opportunity for Amazon sellers right now because Amazon sellers have the cash flow to be able to fund the build out of all of this. But it's also the challenge because if they're only going to be dependent on that, they stand to gain, get pushed out. And I think you have basically just given us a preview of the future. And this is my favorite podcast I've done in a long time. Thank you so much.

Oh, damn. Well, hey, you know, I'm just gonna put you on the spot and tell you that. Thanks, man. I appreciate that's really nice to hear. And let me just put you on the spot in front of all your listeners and say I am hosting a conference in Austin, Texas in August of 2017, early August, and we'd love to have have you come speak, man.

Cool, man. Count me in. Send me some dates when we hang up and then we'll make it happen. You heard it here first on Freedom Fast Lane.

That'll be fun. Yeah, I meant to ask you that. Cool, man. Well, thanks. I like this stuff. I love talking about marketing and I especially love talking about marketing with people who whose marketing I respect and I think you're kicking ass. So thank you so much.

Well, thanks so much, man. Thanks for having such an impact on our industry. Hey, so did you like that or what? That was fun. Special thanks to Ezra Fire Stone for hanging out with us here on Freedom Fast Lane. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with an entrepreneur who, you know, needs to hear about how to grow their brand bigger, how to be more solidified and diversify themselves across multiple channels. Somebody who is doing well but needs to crank things up a notch. Share this episode with them. Have them subscribe to the podcast@freedomfastlane.com and if you like what we're doing here, you're really going to love Freedom Fast Lane TV. You can subscribe to it on iTunes or on YouTube. You can just search for Freedom Fast Lane in either itunes or on that YouTube thing. Hey, it is a privilege to be able to host this show for you. Thanks so much for your support of the show. If you listen to this and you're like, all this E commerce stuff sounds great, but I don't have one of these businesses. We teach this model over@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp. That is our brand builder Bootcamp where you're gonna learn how to build a business is the exact same model that we've used to build more than $100 million businesses. And our students continue to use it to build brands on and off Amazon, to be in retail stores, to be in different channels, to be creating and selling new products, to be selling products that already exist. So that is our flagship or our cornerstone product that we have created many, many millionaires. And that is the 12 month plan to get you there as well. So that's@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp. As always, thanks for listening to the show. I appreciate y'.

All.

I will see you on facebook and@freedomfastlane.com and I'll see you on the next episode.