Perry Belcher : How To Use Content Marketing and Tripwires To Grow Your Sales Fast #TheOnePercent

But this is the thing that's kind of hard sometimes for us all to swallow. Whatever you're selling, people probably really just don't want your shit. They're not excited about buying it. It doesn't mean they don't need takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

Hey, 1 percenters. Today we are sharing a presentation from last year's Capitalism conference with Perry Belcher. Perry is the co founder of digitalmarketer.com and native commerce. He is one of the world's best marketing specialists in the direct response world. If you sell physical products but you don't feel in control of your sales, Perry is the best in the world at creating physical products. Funnels. In this talk from the Capitalism conference, Perry walks us through his ideal funnel system. You'll learn how to target your ideal customer effectively and massively grow your business. Enjoy. Okay, so hi, my name is Perry Belcher. I'm here today to talk to you about Tripwire's premiums and how we got 220 million clicks last year organically. For you guys that are interested in that, I hope you are. My name is Perry Belcher. I'm the co founder of Digital Marketer. Many of you guys know Digital Marketer? A few, yeah. Few. Okay. With Ryan Dice and I started that company about 10 years ago. We have another partner there named Roland Frazier that some of you guys probably saw this morning. Speaks pretty smart guy. I also founded a company called Rival Brands. It's our consumer brand division. We'll talk about that a bit in Native Commerce Media who's here exhibiting at the show.

So what Ryan wanted me to talk about, he wanted me to talk about two things. So in the schedule it says that I'm talking about organic traffic and I'm gonna get to that and try to address that in the end. But Ryan called me a couple days ago and he said so many people still don't understand your tripwire model and how you do tripwires. And I know you've made a lot of advances because I know that Ryan's part of a mastermind group that we're in together. So he said that you made a lot of advances in your tripwire model. So I want to know if you could come in and kind of explain, you know, more in detail one more time what the tripwire is about and how it works and what's what it's really evolved to in your business over Time and how you've taken that one concept and developed it into almost $100 million a year in sales. So we're our companies right now. Digital marketer, native commerce media, rival media, rival brands, and the other companies that we invest and own in, that we own or invest in do collectively around $100 million a year. I've personally sold around $400 million worth of product online.

Since the beginning of the beginning of Internet time, when most of you guys were probably still. Some of you probably weren't born yet. I'm an old guy in this business. I'm the old man in the industry. But I've sold about $400 million of the product online. But most of it's happened after I came up with this tripwire concept with Ryan Dice. So the tripwire, how many of you guys have used a tripwire before and know what it means? Okay, cool. So what a tripwire is, it's quite simple. In the sales cycle, most of us know what a lead magnet is. A lead magnet is usually an opt in. It's something that gets someone to put their name in, raise their hand and say, okay, I'll listen to whatever you've got to say. That was what I used to call a lead. I don't even call those leads so much anymore. We bring in leads now, a few through lead magnets, a lot through contest, and some through what I call conversation surveys. So we use survey funnels or conversation funnels. The difference in a survey funnel for us and a conversation funnel is that during a survey funnel, you just ask a lot of questions. In a conversation funnel, you ask a lot of questions and give answers back as to simulate conversation or listening. Does anybody use surveys in their business right now, in their marketing and their funnels? Okay, so normally you're asking a lot of questions, and at the end, you're asking them to give you an email address or a piece of contact information if you want to see that. If you want to see those people converted a much higher rate at the end of that particular experience.

Every third question you ask in your survey, try to recap their answers and just read them back to them. It simulates listening. We've been able to pick up. We've almost doubled our opt in rate on the back of surveys by doing this one simple thing. So that's a little tip. But all that stuff is secondary to this, I think, of this entire funnel structure. And some of you guys are gonna see Russell Brunson talk about funnels, and he's done very, very well, in the funnel space and has a great tool, click funnels that we use. But funnels get very, very advanced and very muddy down here. And depending on your business, you can do a lot of different things. I'm gonna show you a trick in a second that will double, triple, or quadruple the conversion of every step of this funnel. And it's a very, very simple and easy trick. But this is the big catalyst for us. If this part of this. If this part of the process doesn't work. Funnels typically don't work for us. Campaigns typically don't work for us. That's the tripwire. The tripwire is quite simply an irresistible offer that pushes a prospect over the edge to buy something from you, right?

Excuse me. What we found through an experiment that we did. We bought a company a few years ago called Survive in place. It was a smaller company. It was in the survival preparedness space. It did $30,000 a month. We bought the company. The guy that owned the company only sold products that were $50 to $500, right? We got lots and lots of leads, lots and lots of prospects, but not lots and lots of buyers. What we found was that the buyers who did buy something bought a lot more. So. So most of the sales that we were getting in the business were coming from buyers who had already previously bought something from us. So the big, I guess, epiphany came in asking ourselves one day, what if we just had more buyers? So how do we get more buyers? You offer things that are much, much lower risk, right? You offer things that are actually quite irresistible. For the profit equation, for the value equation that you're talking about, if you've. If you really understand this core tenet of marketing, it'll help you. Every decision that we make when we go to buy something, whether it's buying an idea, whether it's buying the truth or friendship of a person, or buying a product, is an equation. It's a scale, right? So imagine that your client has a scale like this. And on one hand, there's the value or the status increase from whatever it is that you're selling. And on the left hand, it's the cost, the risk, right? It's risk, reward. Risk, reward, right? So if the reward is greater than the risk, you typically do well. If the risk is greater than the reward, you'll do poorly. So a lot of people bring in leads and ask people right away to give them a whole lot of money, to really give them a whole lot of trust immediately early on in the process. And this is problematic, just like it would be problematic in a romantic relationship if you went out to drink a cup of coffee with a girl that you met an hour ago and said, hey, you want to go hit it? Right? You might not get the response that you're looking for. You might get a kick in a junk right now. It's just that you're out of sequence, right? Romance, friendships, dating, anything, there's sequence, there's steps. People walk through a process that usually starts with something very non committal and very low risk. And as they get to know you better, they'll tend to move up the ladder and they're willing to take more risk and be more committal, right? Same is true with a business relationship. Although it's accelerated. It's amazing. Everybody knows that you've got to go through these nurturing steps of working with a customer or working with a, with a romantic interest or making a friend with somebody. But the truth is there's a science to this, right? And that that process cannot be altered. It has to be followed. But it can be accelerated, right? So if you can get people to do things that go in that order, the sequence of a funnel, basically, the quicker that you can get them to do it, believe it or not, the more likely they are to do it. So when someone buys, oh, sorry, when somebody buys something from a tripwire for us, we, we could wait till tomorrow to go back and try to sell them something else. If we did that, our results would reduce by 90%, right? It's no different than. I talk about romance a lot because it has a lot to do with marketing, but it's no different than. It's no different than getting a girl to give you the first kiss or a guy to give you the first kiss. Actually pretty easy to get the guys. So I'll talk about the girls. So get the girls the girl to give you the first kiss, right? When is she the most likely to give you the second kiss? A minute or two later, right? If it was any good, if you weren't like, ah, you know, so the big face ones, those are kind of gross anyway. But if it was pleasurable and if it was a good experience, she's the most likely to give you a second one, right? Then much more likely than she is if you go back and see her tomorrow because she's out of that ether, that's because of a brain chemical called dopamine, which when we make a purchase, no matter how little or how big, there's a brain chemical called dopamine. That floods our brain and it gives us pleasure. Every woman who's ever bought a pair of shoes knows what I'm talking about. Right. You get this pleasure rush. So what do you tend to do after you buy that pair of shoes? You buy another one and another one and another one and a dress and the earrings and, you know how the thing goes. We tend once to be. Once we're in motion, we tend to be in motion. Dopamine is the first trigger. There are a couple of other triggers. One's called serotonin that increases your status. One is oxytocin. That's the love drug. It's community. Right. So if you feel at home, like, for instance, Harley Davidson is a great example. You go buy a Harley Davidson t shirt for 10 bucks. You go buy two of them, you spend 20 bucks. Next thing you know, you're riding a new motorcycle, you're part of the Harley club, and you go into the dealership every weekend. These guys are great at building community. We do a similar thing online. But the biggest thing we have to do first before any of that works is get this person to commit to buy anything from us. Who has an entry point offer in their business right now? Something low ticket, low risk.

Only. Only two or three people, really. Wow. Yeah. This is. This should be life changing for you because it's a little bit advanced, but it should be life changing for you.

Who has, like on the. On. Who can I pick? What's an average conversion rate from cold traffic for one of your offers? Who wants to volunteer and say.

Anybody?

2 to 3%. Yeah. How much is a ticket?

47 bucks. Okay, that's a great example. So you get 100 people to come in. You sell two of them for 47 bucks. I would get 100 people to come in. I would do my very best to sell 10 of them something for much less money, because I know that two or three or four of them are going to go ahead and buy the $47 thing or maybe a much more expensive thing immediately after that initial transaction. Plus, I'm going to have a lot more customers. You have an upsell? Yes. So the other thing I'm going to have that you're not going to have is much more opportunities to show that upsell. Right. Because the more customers I have, the more opportunities I have to show what's next in my funnel. So I won't spend a lot of time on this because I know you're going to hear a lot about this all weekend. But I wanted to make the point that you guys really understand the tripwire. Now. So what makes a good tripwire? This is the best tripwire offer in history. 90% of you probably don't remember anything like this, but you may have seen the one they did with CDs or something else. Who in here is over 40 years old?

Keep your hands up if you bought this offer, right? Most everybody alive bought this, right? This was the 13 records or tapes for a dollar from Columbia House Records. When you join the Columbia House Records club, they sent you extra records every month, right? This was the most success, one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever in history. At one time, this company in Terre Haute, Indiana was selling 15% of of all the music produced in the world. They were the itunes of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, right? They had this amazing program. They went from eight track tapes to cassette tapes, eventually as CDs. Now they still do movies, DVDs and stuff like that. Still works, right? It was a super irresistible offer, right? Nobody could resist this. But they knew their metrics. They knew that for every person who joined this, they were going to be in their club for nine and a half months at $20 a month and they were going to make back $180 to $200 for every person that they gave 13 records or tapes to. They knew their mathematics, right? But this, this offer drove everybody crazy because nobody knows what you're doing. The great thing about having a good tripwire offer is it drives your competition freaking nuts. And when they go out and try to do what you're doing and they don't know their numbers, they go broke and you get rid of them quick. But they just can't compete for the most part if they don't know what they're doing.

So giving you an example, you were talking about your conversion rate. That's about right. By the way, we used to do, when we started the survival business, we used to sell reports like this. This cover is purposely ugly because that market responds to something like this. But this was the report. It was a $7 report. It looked all military field guide like it was a $7 report. And the cold traffic, that converted at 2.3% when we made the change, right? And this is the second part of the Tripwire. This is the Tripwire 2.0. When we did this for three years, we bought that company for $30,000 where it was doing $30,000 a month. Nine months later, it was doing $900,000 a month from using the tripwire model. This was life changing. We Sold so many of these, right? We took them into a continuity program, a membership program on the back, and we built a giant business, 60,000 members at $20 a month. A super good business. We did that for two and a half years. Two, two and a half years. Then we found this little gadget. It's called the credit card knife. Anybody seen these? It's the most banned item by the tsa, the most seized item by the TSA period. There's signs in the Canadian airports now. Anybody? Any Canucks in the room? Yeah. You seen the signs in the Canadian airports that have the picture of it? That's because of me, baby. A million and a half of these we sold in 18 months. A million and a half because, check it out, my clicks didn't cost anymore, but my conversion rate went from 2.3% to 14.5% by switching to a physical premium. And if you don't understand anything about my talk today, you should understand the power and the strength of premiums. If you're not using premiums in your business, you're missing two thirds to three fourths of your conversions, Right. If you, if you want to triple, double, triple, quadruple the conversion of any offer that you're making, and I'll show you a lot of examples in a second, use a premium.

Here are some other premiums that we use in other industries that we're in, other businesses that we're in. We use T shirts a lot. We use T shirts a whole lot. This is for the American Gun Association. This IPAC T shirt converts over everything you're seeing here. Converts over 10% to ice cold traffic. Yes, ma'. Am.

Sure. A premium is anything that entices someone to buy what you're selling, Right? So it's, it's. I'm going to show a video in a minute that'll really clarify it. But it's a, It's a gift that you get when you buy something else. If you, if you, you can go back and look at these offers in time. The football phone from Sports Illustrated back in the savings and loans days when they were trying to get people to open CDs and move from banks to saving loans, they gave you free toasters and steak knives and even shotguns in some places if you open a bank account. So what's interesting about that? That's a point. I'm glad you asked. So what's interesting about that? Point is that. Remember that. Remember this, A tripwire doesn't have. Excuse me. A premium doesn't have to be something related to what you're selling. It just has to be something someone wants. Right. Steak knives have nothing to do with bank accounts. Neither do toasters. Neither do shotguns. Right. But all those things are desirable things. Generally desirable things. At the time that these companies use to do that.

Donald Trump raised money using the Make America Great hat. That's a premium. It was a premium using a political campaign. One of the first times ever we use these IPAC shirts. We Give this shirt away690Pay695 Shipping and Handling at the shirt for free. We do that transaction. Then immediately they're ported over to another page saying, hey, how would you like to join the American Gun Association? The thing about a tripwire that it has to do is identify the market. The trip wire or the premium has to identify the market. If this were just a black T shirt that were really comfortable, it wouldn't do any good for me. I wouldn't know that that person were into guns. Right. Survival seed playing cards. We have all these seeds that you plant at different times on playing cards. That's for our gardening market. We do the credit card knife for survival market. We do this, a couple of these for survival market. This bracelet, the flashlight. This tool. This tool right here, this little gadget Here converts at 16.6% to ice cold traffic on Facebook. It's currently my number one converting tripwire. This is not a makeup palette, by the way. It's a phone case that looks like a makeup palette. So we own makeup tutorials.com the American Beauty association, and this is the premium that we're using right now to get people to join. If I just gave away a phone case, it wouldn't help me. I have to give away something. I have to give away or offer something as a premium that.

Identifies the market. So they're going to get a premium like this when they join the American Beauty association on a junior level. Then I'm going to upgrade their membership in the next step. That's an advancement for us, by the way. Right now, Ryan uses the invisible selling machine book as a physical premium to get you to take a trial in digital marketer labs. How many people took that trial? A few. Half a dozen in the room maybe. So I'll show you what happened with that. That used to convert at 4%. It doesn't convert at 4% anymore.

We added a T shirt to it. Now it converts a little over 11%. So if you want to sell your book and get your point across an authority of selling a book, you can do that. But you've got to add. But guess what? Nobody really wants a book. A book is work, right? A T shirt's fun, especially a T shirt that says, I'm smarter. Right? That's the digital marker mantra, right? But when we added the T shirt to the book, the conversions automatically went up over 10%. Now they're hovering around 11%. It's huge for us because you're taking a trial into digital marketer labs. It's $40 a month, right? Even when they're. Even the companies that sell Tarot cards on Amazon that sell books on Tarot found out that they sold better if they added the Tarot cards to them, even if they charged way more. I've got the Jungle Scout stats on that if anybody wants them. And you're seeing it on Amazon, too. Now, some of the best converting items on Amazon have premiums. The charcoal, the number one charcoal mask on Amazon right now comes with this premium. It comes with a applicator. The For Dummies books are now a lot of For Dummies books, when applicable, are starting to add premiums. So they couldn't sell a ukulele For Dummies book for 12.95, but they can sell it for $49.95 if they give you a ukulele, right? Does everybody kind of get the concept of the premium? So let me show you some of the power of it. Jannik Silver is a good friend of ours, teaches copywriting. He has a copywriting course that's $2,000. For years he tried to increase the conversion on this course. He's a maniac tester. Nothing increased the conversions. Nothing. He added a Kiss me, I'm a copywriter coffee mug and got a 16% increase in conversion to a $2,000 product. It's nonsensical, right? It's nonsensical. But they wanted it.

Right? The very best tripwires we're finding right now are the very best. Premiums we're finding, rather, are personalized premiums, our long tail premiums that help people to identify. So write this down, if you don't mind.

This is one of my own, my only real original quotes that Perry's ever came up with. People buy things.

That remind themselves and tell others who they are.

People buy things that remind themselves and tell others who they are. So I'm about to be a grandpa. My daughter's pregnant right now, right? Anybody got a question?

Anybody curious about anything about that? No.

What? What question?

Boy or girl? Why do you care?

You don't Care. You're never going to buy a gift. Why do you care?

But you'll ask no matter what, even if you just met that person, right? My point, I'm playing with your brain a little bit. My point was to make a point. My point was to make a point. We have a sorting mechanism in our brain that has to sort information. It's involuntary, right? We sort people by the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the way they cut their hair, the way they speak, all sorts of things. We call it judging, but it's not necessarily judging. It's just sorting. If 10 people ask, if you tell 10 people you're having a baby, the first question they ask is 10 out of 10 ask boy or girl, right? They don't care. But you mentally have to sort that. You have to. So when you're doing this, you're playing with a mental tick. That's not hackable, right? This is always going to work. People. People are always gonna buy things. We were at Traffic Conversion Summit a couple of years ago and I went out back. I wish I had this picture. I don't have it with me. But we went out back after. I was talking about this very thing of sorting. Cause I told the experiment in New York, they put two jugs at a Starbucks in front of. Instead of one tip jar, they put two tip jars and they put Spider man or the Incredible Hulk one day. Or they put Mac or PC one day. And tips went up by 400% because people voted with their money. They just wanted to be sorted. 400% increase in tips. But when we, when I left the show that day, we walked out and there was a big, giant dually pickup truck out back. There's one of these big, you know, diesel pumping cowboy machines. And on the back of it in giant letters, someone had went to a sign store and paid probably thirty to a hundred dollars to put these giant letters on the back of this truck that said vegan.

It's the weirdest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life. Who drives a big diesel pump and dually pickup truck and wants you to know. But you know what? Maybe they didn't want to be misidentified. They didn't want people to think, hey, I'm a cowboy farmer, redneck dude. Because I got this big truck. Maybe it was a girl who's a vegan who happens to like horses, I don't know. But it was just really weird. But you'll start to notice this more after this talk. You'll see people put those Stickers on the back of their cars. They've got T shirts that they wear everywhere. Badges. We kill it in badges. In the survival space. It's like Boy Scouts for big boys.

But this is the thing.

That'S kind of hard sometimes for us all to swallow. Whatever you're selling, people probably really just don't want your shit. They're not excited about buying it. It doesn't mean they don't need.

Just means that they don't want it. So if you'll give them something they want a reason, they'll buy your thing that they need and you're still serving them. This is not meant to be an insult. They just don't want it. You know, nobody wants to go to the dentist, but we all need good teeth, right? So if I had a dental practice, I'd figure out premiums that bribe you to come to the dentist office because nobody wants to go. Guess how many people want to sign up for your continuity program? Approximately zero, Right? You got to give them a reason to, then they get value, right? So this is an important point. Once you go through a premium or sell something where you're really intensifying the premium and your copy and your pitch, you need, you need to know this. You haven't sold that thing yet. You're going to get great buyers remorse. Your job is immediately to begin selling the benefits of what you do after the sale is made. But if you start telling them too much about it before, you're going to lose the sale. And I'm going to prove that point to you. Hey, podcast listeners, real fast. I want to draw your attention to January 21st. The 23rd in Dallas, Texas is the next Capitalism conference. This event absolutely will sell out. So I want to draw your attention to it. This is the event where you're going to make the connections, you're going to get the insight, and you are going to get the strategies that are going to allow you to make more money and invest it well and keep it. We also have some pretty sweet bonuses about finding extra sales and revenue in your business and keeping more of it away from the evil tax man. The event is in January in Dallas. This is the thing I am most proud of that we do here@capitalism.com and rather than bore you by telling you all the amazing keynotes that we have, I just got to tell you, it's the most transformative three days that you will spend all year. If you are set on this being your year, this being your time, this era being your opportunity to set you up for life. You need to be at the Capitalism Conference January 21st through the 23rd. Go over to the capitalismconference.com to reserve your spot. I don't know when you're listening to this, but at certain times we're doing some pretty sweet bonus packages too to help you get some results right now and to make really life changing and business changing connections with when you are at the event. So thecapitalismconference.com go there and come to the event. I will see you there. Oh, can you roll the video, please? They're back there. Buying Christmas presents for my boyfriend is one of the most impossible things ever. Everything I get him, he always wants to return. The stores are busy, the cashiers are impatient. Christmas shopping is just about the only thing that wrecks the holiday season. Catch this. It's sports illustration. His most exciting Christmas gift ever. The football. Beautiful television production, right? It's a telephone. My goodness. It's a telephone inside of a football. Awesome. It's a phone. It's a football. I would love something like. Mom, if you're watching, I would love something like this for Christmas. He's looking for the past. It's a phone call. It looks like a football, but works like a regular phone. I love when the guy's on the phone in a minute in front of the stadium, like he's talking to somebody. But there were no cell phones then. Colleen. Yeah, this one. This is fantastic. I'm at the stadium right now. I have a Portfol phone. They must have ran a cord across the parking lot.

And the football phone is free. No way. It's free. Free. Now that's even better. And I don't have to go shopping for it, I hope. What do I have to do to get this? Here's the unbelievable catch. The football phone is free if you get Sports Illustrated at their biggest Christmas savings ever, a year subscription at almost 65% off the COVID price. You can be billed after the new year or you can use your credit card today. So call now. I see you're crazy. Nobody cuts prices before Christmas. I'll buy it for my father, my brother and my boyfriend. You only pay 99 cents an issue. And the subscription includes the NFL, NBA and baseball. Those are all premiums again.

The Swimsuit Edition is a premium for Sports Illustrator. I never got anything I want. Sports Illustrated. I should have thought of that a long time ago. All I have to do is buy this for all the men in my life and I wouldn't have any problems at all. My Christmas Worries are over. I hope she orders that for Christmas for me. Love to have this for Christmas. So mom, if you're watching, please for once, don't wait. Call our toll free number now. Get Sports Illustrated for all your favorite fans at SI's Biggest Christmas Savings ever. And get the football phone free, plus a gift card. Get Sports Illustrated for me for Christmas. I want this phone. Thank you so much. Back at AV so this is the crazy part. That's a two minute long form commercial. 14 seconds is how long they talked about Sports Illustrated.

You're probably all talking too much about what it is that you're selling. You're not talking nearly enough to your people about what they want. It's a giant deal.

If you look at the 13 records and tapes offer, 8% of the page told them what they were buying. The rest of the page showed them what they were getting, the thing that they wanted.

The football phone's pretty amazing. At the time they released that commercial, it was a Hail Mary. Sports Illustrated was going to go out of business. They only had 360,000 subscribers, right? Today they have 3,057,000. But check this out.

The football phone sold 1.6 million Sports Illustrated subscriptions.

1.6 million with the introduction of the football fund. Premiums work, folks. Agora Publishing. Does anybody know these guys at all? Yeah, Agora Publishing. I've been studying these guys for 10 years. But I went and spent a week with Richard Vickery and a weekend with Richard Vickery and Clayton Makepeace a couple weekends ago in Virginia. And you could hit me in the head with a two by four.

They write these big long form sales letters to sell newsletter subscriptions to financial services, expensive stuff.

And they have digital premiums. They have special reports as their premiums. And when we went back through and Clayton started showing me most of their sales letters, he showed me this fact. Their Sales letters average 3500 words. Only 200 words talk about what you're buying. The other 3300 words talk about the premiums you'll get when you buy it.

They sell $1.5 billion worth of newsletters a year. 1.5 billion. Because they figured out that one fact.

Okay? So we talked about using a premium in the beginning of your funnel. Let's talk about it moving down the funnel, right? So we were selling something called the Family Protection association on the back of all of our survival stuff. We sell the American Gun association membership on the back of our gun related front ends, right? So when we were selling the membership Alone. Like who's selling a continuity upsell right now on the back of a front end offer? Anybody. What are you selling? Skincare products. You sell a skincare up front.

Subscription, do they take, do they make the choice for the subscription or are you forcing them? Okay, is, are you, is it pretty clear? Is it sneaky or is it pretty honest? Okay, what's your take?

What's your take rate on the upsell?

If you sell 10 front ends, what do you think you sell on the back? Guess.

30%. That's actually really pretty good. It's actually really pretty good. When you're selling information back ends. When you're selling information membership, it's much, much lower. Physical product membership's better. If you add an additional gift that might help you, you probably lift that even more. Right. So we were selling a membership to the American Gun association with no premium. We had a 7.7% conversion. So out of a hundred people that bought our front end, seven and a half of them would buy our continuity program. When we added this knife, this Hoffman Richter knife, to the upsell as a premium, we went to 23% conversion to the continuity program. And when we customized the knife with their name and the anniversary date that they joined the American Gun association, we went to a 32% premium. All monthly recurring revenue. It's an expensive association for consumer associations. $20 a month. Most consumer associations are $30 a year. So it's a pretty big lift. This was an amazing game changer in our business.

Now. So after the thing when, after I went to see Richard and those guys, they said they probably just don't want what you're selling. They want your stuff, they don't want your shit. He literally said, they don't want your shit. It just resonated so much to me because over the last three or four years, we're beginning to hit a large portion of the market. We've got hundreds of thousands of members now, and it becomes more and more difficult to get people in the organization. Right. So we've got attrition, we've got people falling off, and membership became a little harder for us to sell. So what do you do if your membership's not selling? Well, we add more benefits. Right, Right. You make it better. Right.

So where would you tell them about all those new benefits they're going to get when they join?

In your sales letter? Right. Or in your video? Let me show you this. This is my wistiest screen right here. I start here telling them about the premium. They're going to get the knife right here, we say, how would you like to get this free knife? We'll tell you how in just a minute. Let me. But first, let me tell you about the knife. And I'm telling them all about the knife. And right here I stopped talking about the knife and I start talking about the membership and all the benefits they're going to get.

The longer this becomes, the worse that I do, right? So by the time I got down to where I'm actually making my call to action and close, I'm only talking to 25.5% of the people, or about half the amount of people I was talking to that were interested in the premium. I ran them off.

Talking about what they were getting, not what they wanted. If I. When I push the close up to here.

We got an immediate right at a double in conversion rate just by pushing the close up to right at the end of the premium. And I say, by the way, you're gonna get this newsletter. It's gonna be awesome. Boom. Bye. Now. You don't think that's going to work, but I promise you it will. Try it and it'll blow you away. Split test it.

By the way, we stopped putting a physical newsletter into our membership. We did a digital newsletter instead. How many of you guys here have a membership, have a monthly membership? A few. How many of you send them something physical?

One.

What's your. It's not good evidence, but what's your stick rate? How long do you keep a member?

Four and a half months. What are you sending them? Oh, yeah. Typically speaking for us and for Agora Publishing, that has a billion some dollars. Mark Ford told me this. When they do a digital newsletter versus a physical newsletter, just the newsletter itself, the physical newsletter gives them 2.6 times the stick. So if they're keeping somebody four months, they'll keep them nine months just by sending them a physical newsletter instead of a digital newsletter. People like getting stuff in the mail. People like getting things they can touch and feel. Plus, information published online right now is considered free. The value of it is lower. Right. Information you get in your hand is considered more valuable. Why that is, I don't know, but it is true. All right, that was a side note. You can even use premiums to increase big ticket continuity in your stick series. So Andrew Locks, a good friend of mine, he's a retention specialist. He sells a $400 a month continuity program. And he realized that right at four months of his membership, at $400 a month, he has a. It's on Podcasting me, it's on. It's very high tech stuff. At four months he was getting a big break. His stick was about four months on $400. So at three and a half months now he sends all of his members a signed book and a box of brownies. Total cost about $12.

It adds 2.3 months of additional stick to his cycle. She's getting $900 for sending out a $12 premium. Premiums are at the beginning, your funnel, the meet the middle of your funnel, the end of your funnel and all the way through. There are a lot of other ways to use them. Front end sales continuity, upsells retention, webinar attendance. If you sell by webinar and you want people to show up, give them a premium. Live event attendance, give them a premium. Affiliate contests are all about prizes and premiums book. Who runs affiliate contests? Anybody? Anybody run. Have affiliates at all? Anybody have affiliates? Yeah. Okay. If you're not running contests for your affiliates, you're losing a lot of your effectiveness. Affiliates will kill themselves to win a prize. I don't know why or what it is or why that's true. But you can. They will absolutely burn their list up and kill themselves to win a prize versus making a commission. It's just true. Premiums work for affiliates, book campaigns. You compare them, launches, even contributors. If you're running media properties, we give premiums now to our contributors who write stories for us and send us videos. Really, really, really works across the board. People ask me who we get to print for us. There's a company called Print and Fill. They print all of our stuff. Laser, etch, print our T shirts, all that stuff and and actually ship them. That's Jeff is the guy there. Full disclosure, I bought part of this company two weeks ago. So if you spend some money with him, I might make a nickel one day.

I added this slide because I know you're probably going to get the slides at the conference. It's a little benefit I couldn't really go through or have the time to go through, but it's something I've worked on for the last 10 years. These are the 49 things to split test in an offer. You might want to take a picture of it if you're not going to get the slides. These are the things in order we test that have the highest effect. So you can look here. List selection, ad copy, email service provider, subject lines. Because nobody thinks about that. The sale process for most of us starts at the email level. So if they're not seeing the email or that it's not being delivered or that it's not getting open. They're never gonna see your sales letter. Most people start optimizing on the sales page. The earlier you optimize in your funnel, the more successful you're going to be.

Anybody else need that up for a second or two longer?

All right, so that's the tripwire talk that Ryan wanted me to give and replace the content talk with how we got 220 million clicks last year. So I've got 7 minutes and 45 seconds. So I know that I can't teach you that. So we did get 222 million clicks lessons, not 220, it's 222 clicks million clicks. Last year to our properties we own sewing.com, makeup tutorials.com, survival life, a bunch of these others in our rival media group. The lady that did all that work, all that work was done.

By a lady named Karen King that I'll talk to you about in just a second who now runs Native Commerce Media. They're vending here so they're our done for you content service. Karen is an absolute beast. If you get a chance to meet her, you should. She's the most systems minded person you will ever meet. She manages a team of 150 people that generate content that generates us and our clients hundreds and hundreds of millions of clicks. So since I can't talk to you about all that and go through that hour long presentation that I usually give that still skims anyway, I decided not to let you down. So Karen, Karen developed a full training that, that originally started to be for our group and it still is. It's what we use to train all of our media people. We had planned one day to sell it. I don't know if we will if and when we do, it's 1,000 or 2,000 bucks. It takes a long time to go through. Don't do it yourself, give it to an employee, let them learn it. But it's her 88 sops that get us all that media traffic. So.

Right now, when I'm finished now I might have five minutes for questions. Right now when I'm finished, if you'll go to the Native Commerce booth out back and give any amount of money. I don't care if it's A$10,$20, whatever you can afford to coats for kids. It's a great organization. We're gonna, Karen's gonna roll those up and we'll let everybody know how much we gave total. But if you'll give any amount of money to Coats for Kids. She'll give you the entire course free. So you guys can do exactly what we do. I will warn you in advance, it is a freaking metric fuck ton of work, right? So you may or may not want to do it. And I may have a sneaky motivation of if you don't, if you decide not to do it, maybe you'll just hire us to do it for you. So we'll see, but that doesn't matter. But we'll absolutely give it to you. And that's at the Night at Native Commerce Media booth in the. I think it's directly out this door to the front. And you should meet Karen and pick her brain and spend a lot of time with her. Okay. I can't believe I'm done kind of sort of on time. I got five minutes, 21 seconds for questions. If anybody wants to ask anything, you come to the mic up front.

Yes, sir. Would you mind, does this need to be on? Oh, I don't know. Is it on? Is the mic on? Question mic on. Okay. Would you mind repeating that, please? Would I, Ryan? Repeating everything you did. Everything I did? Yeah. Because I'm on crack today. I had like this much time to deliver a day's worth of content. You're not as bad as Russell, though. Oh, yeah. Russell's crazy. And rolling. My question as I was thinking about this is all, this looks great and I've heard you speak before and I always come away going, shit, that's a lot of stuff. And I don't even know where to start. Yeah, do you do all this stuff or do you have a huge staff that does all this stuff? We have a huge staff that does it, but we have a huge staff that does it for 80 properties. Right. If you're doing it for one property, it really ain't all that. It ain't all that much. And now with companies like Print and Fill, which I'm really, I'm really excited about that company, I think they're going to do great because they print all the stuff, house it for you and ship it for you. So. And it's dirt ass cheap. You can't possibly, you can't possibly do it for what they can do it for. Okay? You send the list and they go, you just tell them what you want it. What, what you want to happen and they make it happen. Right. It's much easier because marketers are. I'll tell you guys, though, just to rant for just one second, it's like well, it's a lot of trouble. Yes, it is. I want it to be hard. I want it to be difficult for you to compete with me. Yeah, makes sense. I don't want it to be easy. I want a high barrier to entry. Okay. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks.

Yes. I really enjoyed your presentation. Thank you. I think I saw years ago online. I think you might have done something in the health space and I'm in the health and wellness. Yeah. I got a ton of trouble. Almost went to jail. Don't touch it with a 10 foot pole. I say the uplammate say business. Now I don't even say the word. Okay, okay. Cost me eight and a half million dollars. Almost put me in jail. Thanks. Anyway. Well, I'm glad you're here. Glad you're here and not there. Right? Yes, yes. So anyway, my question is what I'm, I've been doing kind of a broad based thing and I want to niche down into pre diabetic, diabetic stuff, kind of lifestyle based, A lifestyle based system with coaching and continuity, that kind of stuff. I'm a little bit, and I'm just getting, getting started with that and I'm a little bit at a loss as far as the trip wire. Any sort of an evaluation kit or anything that helps with a symptom. Like I know those people have problems with their feet. Yeah. Neuropathy. Yeah. So anything that might help with this symptom. People typically don't go out looking for a global solution to their problems. They go out, usually go out looking for a solution to a symptom of their problem, whether it be physical, mental health, business or whatever they look at. They're out trying to find somebody to hire. So they look for hiring information when they really have a larger problem. They have a culture problem. So in order to sell them something about culture, you're going to have to give them that thing they want or immediately thinking about first Right. Before you can sell them an overarching thing. We get ahead of ourselves. We say, hey, you want to go out on a date with me? Yeah, let's go get a cup of coffee. Oh, well, we've been here for 10 minutes and we like each other. You want to go get married? Yeah. And the answer is absolutely, positively not. You know, unless if you, if that chick says yes, you don't want that chick. Yes. So. Yeah. So. So look for a solution that's going to, based on, based on the symptom. Good but incomplete. Yeah. Right. In the, in the, in the. I used to be the largest Candle supplier in the world. The candle supply. The largest candle supply business in the world. And I started it with no money because I sold candle wicks cheaper than anybody else. Okay. It was a necessary part of the business. Everybody else made big margins on them. I sold them for less than cost. Yeah. In nine months, I acquired every buyer in the market. Then I sold them everything else. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thanks very much. Yes, sir. Since sir, I can't hardly see. The lights are so bright. If you. If you're not a sir, you ugly ass woman.

Definitely all grown ass man. Just saying with the deep voice. Just saying. Yeah. Perry, question on any resources on setting up associations, Kind of manage them. Yeah. I'll give you a couple. Really, they're easier than you think. We've really made a big switch lately. I probably shouldn't talk about this, but I am. We're killing all of our membership sites now. Killing them all. All of our memberships are managed through private Facebook groups. No money, much more sticky, much more reactive. So you just use a private Facebook group as your community. And there's a company that we use. You've got to figure out. We use print and fill to print our newsletters, our physical newsletters. And there's a company that we use called Abenity that's in, I think, Atlanta, and they offer benefit packages very similar to AARP or AAA. That's $350 a month for the whole package. It's like 60,000 discounts, benefits, and a bunch of stuff. And it doesn't matter if you got a million members. It's 350 bucks a month forever for your program. And they private label it to you so it looks like it's you. It makes you look like a big deal. So. So Facebook group, benefits, newsletter. Yeah. Check. Yep. I could probably take one or two more. I've got to be really quick. Is that Marissa? Are you in here? Awesome. Thanks for all the info and especially for all the examples. Super interesting. No worries. Numbers, conversion numbers. I'm curious if you were. If you had just a small team and let's say like a million dollars smaller company, physical product company, and you wanted to go into doing all of this, how would you structure your team? What would you do in house? What would you offer? Sure. I can kind of tell you. So we have three departments in our company that's very small. We've had. We've tried 57,000 versions of this. Right. There's somebody who's running the business. Right. There's an editorial manager for us. We have editorial, because we have the newsletters. We've got a. But you can do that part time. You can hire that out if you only have one. I have a lot of them. Right. We have an editorial director. We have seven. Director of monetization. That's the person that manages the list and make sure that all the sales are getting where there are that all the list revenues coming in. And then we have a person that manages media. We have a media traffic buyer. But before I spend any money and before I did anything else in this process for iu, I would make sure that I had a tripwire offer that worked. Yeah, don't go build the whole funnel. It's a huge mistake. If the tripwire is not going to work, it's all for naught. And you spent six months building a funnel. It's never going to work. Make a trip where I work first. Dry test it. Spend a little money. Buy your products on Amazon and give them away on Facebook. I do it all the freaking time. I buy products on Amazon all the time at retail and give them away on Facebook to see if that's what will make them bite. Right. Once I find out what that is, then I can start building everything else because I've got something and for us it's 10% conversion or over and then we know we have something and we move on. All right.

No, not exactly. The tripwire that we're actually giving people is a guide. Right. It's a, it's a, it's a survival guide. But the premium, when you get that survival guide is a gadget and that's kind of important because you want to make sure you bring in people, have good intent of buying information for me. Right. Let me take one. Yeah. Hello, first of all. Thank you. Oh, you're very welcome. I have a three part question. Yep. When you're choosing the product to sell, or rather to give away on the front end, where do you aim to break even? How do you choose the value of the product and do you connect that to the value of the membership? Meaning if it's a 20amonth versus something that could be a couple hundred a month. Yeah, yeah. You can always. You can always. It just gives you more room to. I try to put out the best premium I could possibly put out. Right. And sometimes it kind of looks a little ridiculous though. You know, you can almost go over the top. Like the coffee mug really worked when other things didn't. Right. But to answer your question, this is. These are a couple of my little sneaky tricks. I don't really tell anybody. The best place to find a premium in the world is to go to Amazon's most wished for list. Not their best sellers, but the products that are most wished for. The best premium is similar to the best gift. Like if you're giving somebody a gift for Christmas this year, who's buying somebody a vacuum cleaner for Christmas? Nobody. Right. Nobody wants a vacuum cleaner because it spells work. If you gave your wife a vacuum cleaner, she'd punch you in the junk.

You know, because that spells work. You might need a vacuum cleaner, but nobody wants one. The best gifts are things that people want but are not usually willing to buy for themselves or they're not readily available. To clarify, this is the, the first kind of like the. All of them. All of them. So how so on the, on the tripwire, what I'm usually look, I go to Amazon again, I choose the category the most wish for. I look for the most wished for things under $10 because I can usually buy those in China for less than a buck and then I'll, then I kind of know. But I use, I use Amazon every day as a data source. Thank you so much. Thank you. Last question. Yes, sir. Hey, Perry, been following you for a long time. Thanks. Learned a lot, copyright writing and all that. But what I wanted to ask was. So I have an Amazon full service consulting agency and like we do full service Amazon management for them and it's hard to find like an ideal high level client that has cash pockets and you know, they're doing lots of things right. Sure. So it's hard to like, you know, like most Amazon sellers here are not good clients because they're like startup. Right. You know, all that. So I'm having trouble like you know, trying to do webinars or stuff like that, but attracting that. Right. Ideal, you know, attracting that Amazon seller. Yeah. And because we're just doing cold email prospecting and getting. We did a long time before and, and we had a tripwire there. We gave away a piece of software. Yeah. Called Freshkey. Yeah. You could potentially license a piece of software that you could then give away or sell for a very inexpensive. We didn't give it away, we sold it for 10 bucks. Yeah, but, but yeah. If you, if you get a license of somebody else's piece of software that you could sell for five or ten dollars. That has to do with, you know, what they love is crystal ball reading on Amazon. They want to know what's everybody looking for on Amazon. What's really selling on Amazon. It doesn't have to be a really robust tool like a jungle Scout. It can be a very beginner tool. You sell it for five bucks to somebody, right? You got buyer intent, and now you're good to go. Okay, but how do I target the ideal people? And I get them hard coming in? It's hard in your business. I don't like your business because of that. Because, like, it's easy on. It's easy on for me. Like, I'm in the gun space. I just got to find dudes that like guns on Facebook. There's a lot of them. So I don't. I don't like spaces where markets are hard to identify. Yeah, you're going to probably have to work with JV partners mostly, but still incorporate the premium guys. I got to run. Thank you all so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, 1 percenters. We hope you enjoyed this presentation with Perry Belcher from the Capitalism Conference. To see more presentations like this, go subscribe to the capitalism.com channel on YouTube and click the bell to turn on notifications so you never miss a new video. Thank you for listening, and thank you for taking responsibility to come up with the world's solutions. It's entrepreneurs like you who create the change in the world.