AdSkills' Justin Brooke Talks About Book Funnel Secrets

Sure.

A little more about AdSkills. And at the same time, I mean, you're doing some unique things to acquire more students as well. I mean, we've, you know, you've been very gracious with your time. You've talked about, you know, kind of the book funnel stuff that you do, right? So let's talk a little more about AdSkills and how you guys are unique compared to the other kind of marketing training programs out there.

Yeah, sure. I just wanted to correct something I said before. I said that, you know, 6-figure, that was like 10 years ago. We've gone on to quite successful. So, with AdSkills, you know, the main way, you know, how the business model works, we're more of a publishing company, but we are a training company than a course because we have like 14 courses, we have other instructors, and the way that we fuel our acquisition is with a book funnel. And the reason why I believe a book funnel is so good, especially in this market, you know, where I'm selling training, is it self-selects a self-learner. So nobody's going to pick up a book who isn't a self-learner. So by acquiring those kind of leads— and we do free plus shipping, but, you know, lately I'm kind of seeing that you don't even really need to do the free plus shipping thing. People are okay with buying books, you know, they don't mind paying $9.99 for a book. So you can just charge outright for it, but that lead is really good because it's a buyer. Um, there's really no compliance issues with ad networks when you're selling a book. It's very harmless, you know, there's no hype or sensationalism. It's a book. Everybody understands a book. And, um, and then it's always on their shelf, you know, and so they're always remembering your brand as well every time they look at your bookshelf. And so we, we do the book and then we have an upsell, usually like a $149, $249 type of upsell, couple of courses. It's kind of our appetizer, if you will. And then once we get them in through the appetizer, deliver them an experience, now we follow up with what we call our tour. In the software world, you guys use the demo, you know, the free demo. And so I borrow a lot from y'all growth hackers, and we just do a tour. And the tour is we're showing them inside our membership, and it's like, look, look at all the stuff that we have. you don't yet have in your members area, and then we sell them the full product from there on a Zoom call.

That's awesome. So, I mean, for those of you wondering, I mean, because we have a good amount of people from tech and also from the internet marketing world as well, internet marketing world understands the book funnels pretty well. But so when you're running ads, are you making money or are you breaking even on the initial kind of front end?

This is a good question because I believe that the books work for every audience. You know, if you're selling knives online, you can have a book about knives. If you're selling software, you could have a book. HubSpot, they used to have the inbound marketing book, you know, so it definitely works. Some days we're profitable, some days we're not. It really depends, you know, you know, if it's Easter, it's probably not profitable. We don't do too well on weekends. And so we try to use dayparting in our ads so that we're pushing the best of our budget to our most profitable times. But overall, on a long scale, it's really just a break-even and a little bit better than break-even. And that's really, that's our acquisition. We don't really care about making money there. We're just trying to get acquisitions for free, essentially, so that we can then get them on the tour, which is where we make our money. And then, we also do workshops. Got it.

So, I want to understand a little better. I mean, so, just so people understand this. I mean, when I'm talking about the front end, you know, obviously, it's the initial offer. Right? Usually, um, with, with big software companies, they can afford to wait a year, 2 years, 3 years to get paid back on a customer. Um, but what you're doing right now is at least you are in, in the digital marketing world or internet marketing world, we call it a self-liquidating offer, right? So it's something where you break even, but then you make all your money in the backend, right?

Um, first 30 days breaking even. Yep.

First, so first 30 days you break even. At what point do you start becoming profitable with this funnel? Like how long do people need to wait?

Um, you know, I don't have that metric. I know that our leads are like fired up, ready, like the best leads for us are like our 90-day leads. And so that's someone— we have 2 periods, okay? So we have someone who, if we try to reach them before they've been delivered the book, leads are horrible. They're like, dude, let me, let me read your book first, you know, and then sell me something. If we reach them about 2 weeks That's just in time for them to have read the book and they're really hot at that moment. If we don't reach them at that moment, it seems like it takes about 90 days. And so what's happening is they're getting emails from us, they're getting social media, YouTube videos, podcast interviews. About that 90-day mark is when they've really been exposed to us and that lead is really hot again for us.

Got it. And so walk us through how the business works. I mean, how do you make money? How do you charge for your programs? And, you know, feel free to reveal whatever you're comfortable talking about.

Yeah, sure. So I didn't want to— the biggest problem I had when I was just selling courses is everybody wanted me to be on the sales calls, me to be on the webinars, me to be in the courses, me to everything. And then it's a horrible business model. Nobody wants to buy it because if I go away, the whole thing goes away, you know. So we switched over to the publishing model, which is much better, and now we have a bunch of different instructors. I'm not going to reveal exactly the agreements we have with instructors and whatever, but the instructors teach the courses. We make sure that each instructor has at least $1 million worth of experience. That way our students know that they're learning from credible people and that they can accurately teach the material. So we have the instructors that gives us all of our different courses that allows us to expand out to YouTube ads and Facebook ads and Google allows us to expand to all the different markets that our customers would be in and the needs of our customers. And then the other way that the business model works is, you know, we do a Zoom call. It's, you know, we do have some one-call closes, but often it's a follow-up process. We sell the package for $5,000, and that gives you lifetime access to the community, all the courses, certification. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you get with it. Um, what other questions do you have about the model?

Yeah, uh, you know, one thing I want to point out too is, um, you know, Justin's actually been there. He's done that, right? He's actually worked with, um, you know, the top brands in the space. I think, you know, um, what I've been seeing in Clubhouse recently, um, you know, I know Jason Calacanis has been calling out coaches and consultants and things like that. Um, they tend to get a bad rap because there's often people that are pitching, um, credentials that they do not have. They're, they're like talking about things and that they don't really understand, and then they, they claim that they're these you know, 9-figure entrepreneurs and things like that, right? So, um, it can get a little kind of, you know, iffy at times. So I, you know, can you talk about how your stuff is, again, how it's, it's different? Because I want people to understand, it's like, oh, I don't want— it's like, oh, Eric brought on like a, like a course person, right? I want them to understand that there is a difference.

There is absolutely a difference, and I understand that argument. And I've always— I got kind of my hands slapped years ago, uh, in that argument. And I made sure to always have one client, you know, because I never wanted that guy to be able to— some forum or some group somewhere to accuse me of only being a teacher. And so I always wanted to have a screenshot that when they said that, I could just slap them with a screenshot of my recent performance. And so I really am, you know, I ran an agency for years. I've done millions of clicks in a day. My best, uh, you know, my crowning achievement was 17,000 leads in one day at about $2 a lead. Um, so I've, I've been there, done that. I've had, you know, dinners paid for me by Google guys on their black card and, uh, lived it. And that's what I try to make sure every one of our instructors does as well, because I just like Jason Calacanis. I'm a big fan of him as well. I, I agree. There is a lot of this pretender. There's a lot of this fake it till you make it out there in the YouTube and, uh, course world. And so my promise to my customers, what I think every course seller should promise to their customers, is real legitimate instructors, just as like you would have in a college. And so we make sure that every instructor has— and they have to show us proof that they've spent $1 million or more. And, and some people come back and they say, oh, they can spend $1 million. You don't spend $1 million and not learn, you know, the mistakes, and not— you don't spend $1 million and never make a sale. Rarely does that happen.

Got it. So, um, you're going back to the book funnel real quick. I mean, so you have, uh, it's basically a low-dollar offer and then you, you, you know, upsell to kind of $150 courses. Right. And then you're trying to self-liquidate there. And then at the very end of it, I mean, you have higher-dollar offers, maybe a couple thousand bucks, $10,000 or whatever. I'm just making numbers up right now. Um, and so, you know what, if people want to get started with this, let's say they have a SaaS product, right. And they, it's like, yeah, absolutely. If I have a SaaS product talking about, um, maybe it's a sales CRM, I should be talking more about, you know, probably the best sales tactics or strategies in the world, right? I'm just, for example. So how did they get started? Because it sounds like, you know, oh my God, there's a lot of logistics around putting a book together, right? First you have to write it and then you have to worry about, okay, who's gonna handle fulfillment? Who's gonna handle the design? All that type of stuff, right? So, you know, how do you deal with all that if someone wants to get started?

Yeah. I was just trying to see if I had a copy of my book here just so I could show. It's You know, we're not talking about like this large tome of like my whole, you know, my book is on one singular topic of advertising, just retargeting. And so I think it's about 78 pages long. We use 48hourbooks.com for our printing, very cost effective. And then we use shipoffers.com for our actual fulfillment. So 48 Hour Books puts it together. I wrote it in an ebook, actually. My wife did this for me as a Father's Day gift. She took a series of emails I was writing about retargeting, and so I got to write it like one day at a time. She compiled all that into a PDF, and she's— she went to college, so she went and edited all my there, there, and theirs and all that. Um, then she took that to 48 Hour Books. They turned it into a book, pushed it over. I think we buy 500 at a time over to ShipOffers. And then ShipOffers actually delivers it, and they, they're connected directly with our shopping cart. So it's actually very simple to do. It sounds elaborate, but it's actually very simple to pull off.

Love it. Well, there you go. There's a couple tools for you right there. And the final, final question I'm gonna have right now— not the final tool— final question is, you just mentioned a couple of services that you use. I mean, what are your favorite marketing tools at the moment? What's in your marketing stack that, that you can't do without?

Marketing stack that I can't deal without right now. I'm looking at the bottom of my, my Mac right here. Zoom obviously is huge to us all right now in all ways, you know, both in webinars, interviews, podcasts, all those kinds of things. Really big fan of tools like AdEspresso and Revealbot. Revealbot is, I think, is a sleeper that a lot of people don't know about. Revealbot allows you to do more than what the Facebook ad network allows you to do. And it does it in a, in a way that's okay with compliance, but it allows you to program things. It allows you to have different automated rules like stop losses in the, in the stock market. You can have that with your ad buys, so you make sure you're not just bleeding all your money away. So that's another one I love. And if I was going to say one more, you know, I kind of need to see my Stuff here. Oh, you know what one I'm really happy about right now? It's called— I think it's called flick.tech, and they are an Instagram monitoring hashtag. You know, it allows me to store a bunch of hashtags, do my post, and then I can see what I'm ranking on. It allows me to see a lot more analytics about my Instagram, and it's been hugely helpful to me.

What it's called— what is it called again?

Flick. Like you, like flick, you know, uh, .tech, I believe.

Flick.tech. Okay, I'm just pulling it up right now too. Okay, that's awesome. So guys, check out all these tools. Um, that's been great. So yeah, I, I just really wanted to front-load this interview with, with you first, but, uh, I'll turn it over to you now.

Yeah, man. So, uh, just for my own audience here, I've been following Eric Siu for a long time. Uh, remember when you were just a growth hacker? Now you've got a bunch of things going on. And I like to follow the guys who I see are hungry that are coming up with new ideas. You know, I'm always looking for new ideas. And so I saw that you were not just a growth hacker. A lot of the growth hackers at that time were like programmers. And so it didn't jive very well, me being a marketer and then the growth hacker. But you were— you had a marketing mind to it all. And I loved what you were doing in the podcast that you started. And so followed you for quite a while. And then I saw that this book that you were doing, and I'm a big fan. There was another book sort of like it. Um, again, I don't, you know, really— I don't want to create a bunch of dead airtime, but there's, uh, the Leveling Up book for your body, you know. Um, and so I'm a huge fan of gaming, uh, RPGs, and I really believe that life is a video game. We're always gaining XP. And so, uh, your book I just thought was amazing. Can't wait to get my hands on a copy so I can give it to my son.

That's awesome. Yeah. I appreciate that. And I agree with you. Life's all about just getting XP every day and leveling up 1% each day.

Right?

And if you look at everything as a puzzle, it just becomes way easier and way more fun. So I think that's largely what you're doing too. Right? Like you're just enjoying your time. Like if you want to do college right now, you would do that.

Right?

If you want to do something else, you'll do it. Like you do whatever you want. Like success to me is just Working on the things you want to work on every day.

Yeah. So me asking you a question here for my audience, you know, what would you say— our audience is very much build your email list, make offers to your email list. That's generally how our, our business works. So what's a growth hack within the building an email list? What's something you might add to someone who's building an email list that might help them build the email list even better?

Yeah, so I'll give you one thing that's a little fresh right now. So, um, you're familiar with the, the whole NFT craze right now?

Yes, yes.

Yeah, so, um, I have, um, there's a friend of mine, um, and he gave away—

Near field technology?

No, no, this is a non-fungible token, so take a look at it afterwards. You might—

Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about where you tap the phone to the things.

Oh yeah, I guess that's an NFT as well, but, uh, so So basically, look, he gave away an NFT and he gained a ton of, um, he gained a ton of followers and he got, um, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions, right? So imagine if you took that and you applied it to your email list, right? So let's say your email list— I'm just— this is— let's say your email list is crypto enthusiasts right now. You say, hey, if you share this with, with, uh, with people right now, um, you know, whoever wins, you know, I will make sure that I, I give this, uh, this NFT away to you. It's basically a giveaway, right? Um, but the engagement is just nuts. Like, it has to be— it has to align with what people are interested in. It has to align with kind of what's hot in pop culture right now. And I'm like, yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. Like, now I'm looking at— I'm like, dude, I just want to do this every week and just give something away like that, right?

You can even do credits. You can even do credits. You know, you're going to earn credits toward future things. Okay.

Yeah, so that's huge, right? And by the way, this whole NFT thing, you can definitely take a look at it from a marketer's perspective. This book Right here, those of you that can see the video right now, I can say, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make 100,000 NFTs. These non-fungible tokens are basically virtual collectibles, right? And I can decide if I want to make 1 of 1 or 1 of 100,000, right? And so maybe the first 90,000 or so, um, I can— these, this would be kind of the, uh, um, the bronze edition, right, of leveling up. So you get the NFT, right? You get NFT of the book, which is like, maybe it's a JPEG of the book, but you can resell it later. And then you can get the physical copy too, right? And maybe you can recoup the cost of the book. You pay $20 or whatever. And then for the next like 10, maybe the next, uh, 9,000 or so of the 10,000 remaining, um, we do a silver one. So maybe it's $100 and then maybe you get a monthly call with me, just making things up, right? Then there's 1,000 left. Maybe you do 999 are the gold edition, right? And you get to do a mastermind. You pay $10,000 or something like that. And then you get one where like I come in and I live at Justin's house, right? Like maybe Justin buys, I live with him forever, right? And maybe Justin has to pay me, you know, $5 million for that. But there's a lot of implications behind this stuff. So I know we're kind of talking about email and growing it, but I just got a little more excited about the NFT stuff.

Yeah, no, I love it, man. And, you know, just one lesson, 'cause you got a book book there, you know, what's a lesson you learned in Everything that the publishers and the other authors told me was correct.

It took me 6 years to actually complete this. And I was leveling up in those 6 years as well. So I grew a lot in those 6 years. And yeah, it's a lot of— it's grueling work. I mean, there's a lot of edits and things like that. And there's times where I just didn't want to finish it, right? But because I put it out publicly, I held myself accountable to that. And I will say that it was a lot of quarterbacking for me, but the team, the design and all that stuff, I mean, it was largely the team, but I did have to get pretty hands-on with it. And I also learned that I went with the hybrid publishing model because I wanted to have kind of the power behind a publisher pushing it. They had a sales team behind it as well, but I also had full control from a book funnel perspective, from a marketer's perspective. I wasn't trying to make money from the book out the gate. Um, it's more so about spreading the message of, you know, life is just a game and here's how to play it.

That's great, man. I'm really looking forward to it. Where can we, uh, were we pre-ordering right now or can I go order it right now on Amazon?

It's available now.

Yeah.

You can go to Amazon or you can go to levelingup.com. And I'll tell you a story here. If you're in your—

Great name.

Yeah. Thanks.

Yeah. I'm interested. Tell me.

So we actually got $65,000 of bulk sales. So if you go to levelingup.com/bulk, that's B-U-L-K. Um, there are a couple of different offers there and here's how we got the sales. I actually did this, um, this launch party on Clubhouse, the drop-in audio, um, social app. And this was the day before the launch. And so one of my Clubhouse friends, she was like, hey, like, why don't we do a launch party? Um, and, um, you know, it was a 2-hour thing. They were interviewing me. People were coming up asking me questions about the book and all that. It was like a celebration. Right. And I didn't expect much to happen from it, but there were a couple of times where she was asking me, hey, like, where can people go? I was like levelingup.com/bulk. One person paid $35,000, another one paid $15,000, and another one paid—

Wow.

Right?

That is brilliant.

About 4,500 book sales right there. And I'm just like, dude, I should have just done this like way earlier.

Um, but I'm sending this to my general manager so he could do it with our book. Yeah, it'd be awesome.

It'd be killer. I mean, the thing with Clubhouse is you, you have to, you know, the two— because I spent 2 months of time on there and I built a lot of rapport with people. There are a lot of great people coming through. I looked at the analytics I didn't make a webinar or anything. 1,500 people actually came through the room, and I was like, wow, like, if I was paying for that on Facebook, that would be what, for 1,500 attendees?

At least $1,500.

Yeah, yeah, if not more, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, so, um, anyway, that's what happened there.

That's great, man. Well, man, I'm, I'm super happy to have a chance to have an interview with you. If you have any other questions for me, I'm, I'm here. I'm all yours.

Yeah, I mean, my only other question for you would be, um, what is the most impactful book that you've had, that you've, that you've ever read? So that you have to pick one.

Oh yeah, all right, hold on. I definitely have that one around here and it's red. Yep, there it is. I know this one is never too far away from me. This is The Ultimate Sales Bible. I've made millions off of this thing here and this is a new copy. Because my old one had like coffee stains and bent pages and highlighters, and I couldn't even read it anymore. So I got a, I got a new copy, but that, that is the one book I swear by. And really just chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, maybe 7, 4, 5, and 6.

The Ultimate Sales Machine, just for those of you that can't see it, written by the late Chet Holmes.

Great book. Yes. Phenomenal.

All right, Justin, what else you got before we, before we close out?

Well, and I guess I'll just ask you the same question. What's, what's the one book for you that we should all have on our shelves?

Well, I mean, usually when people ask me this question, it's the first one that comes to mind. And so I haven't really—

Leveling Up.

Well, besides my own, uh, thank you for that. Um, it would probably be the one I remember most is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Um, it's really—

That's a good one.

Yeah, it's a business and entrepreneur— it's the most recommended book on the Leveling Up podcast. So it's just, you remember all the stories, like all the stuff you have to go through as an entrepreneur. And really, like, I do think business is really, you know, it does hone your skills on how to work with people. And that's what life is, right? So I do think business is the ultimate game, but, you know, people can feel free to disagree with me. It's just my take on it.

I thought there was great stories in that book, very well written, great stories of behind the scenes of a lot of really large companies, which made it easy to to keep going in the reading. But what I really got out of that book is how hard it was for them, realizing that my business wasn't as hard as I thought it was. And it made me fall back in love with my business. I was like, oh man, I got it easy.

That's big. Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

Dude, this was great. I hope this becomes a trend. I would love to see some more dueling interviews on, on podcasts. It's kind of fun.

Well, Justin, let's close it out this way. So what's the best way for people to find you online?

Uh, just Google Justin Brooke if you want, or Justin Brooke interviews. You search Justin Brooke on YouTube. I like to give first, you know, so go get all the free stuff that we have out there first, see if you really like it. And then if you want, then come on over to AdSkills and, uh, we'll gladly accept your money.

Awesome, that's great. Yeah, and on my end—

And you as well.

Yeah, just go to levelingup.com and you can reach me on Instagram or Twitter @EricOSIU. And, uh, yeah, we will see you guys in the next episode.

Let us—

by the way, tweet at me if you actually enjoyed this, and then tweet at Justin as well. See you later.

All right, see ya.