Publishing Powerful Front End Offers & Scaling Cold Traffic with Patrick Riddle

Welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad, and today I've got a friend of mine who I've known for years and really was looking forward to getting him on this episode because I've watched a lot of the evolution of what he's done as an entrepreneur and been really impressed how he has grown, broke through plateaus, reinvented his business model and just really started to dial in what he and his business, his core competency is. Patrick Riddle is on the show today. And I met Patrick years ago, I believe in one of our masterminds, and he's in the real estate investing space where he has launched courses and products and trainings and worked with other coaches and gurus and people to help work with them. And he's done quite a bit of everything. And when he reached out recently and we were catching up on some of the strategies that he's been using, I really wanted to get him on the show so he could share some of this stuff, not only with you fine folks, but with me. Because as you know, I've got the most selfish podcast on itunes and I love bringing people on the show where I can learn from and apply what they're using, and hopefully you can, too. That's one of the things I love about this show, is it's typically very actionable. So if you are in the marketing space, especially if you sell information, products, coaching or expertise of some sort, you're probably going to want to listen really closely to this as we find out what's been working for Patrick. Patrick, welcome to Bacon Wrap Business.

My man, Brad. Good to be here, man. It is. It's an honor because many years ago I started listening, or when I started listening to podcasts, this was one of the first ones, ones that I paid regular attention to.

I love it. I'm super glad, Glad to hear that and I'm happy to have you on. So let's dive into some cool stuff like your background. Like how long have you been. I don't want to dive too deep. Like a lot of people dive real deep into the, oh, tell me your entire entrepreneurial journey story. But I kind of want to get the background because it really pertains to how you've evolved your business and how you've kind of pivoted and changed the structure. So take us through a little bit of that before we dive into what's really been working well for you.

Cool. Happy to, man. My real entrepreneur journey started in college. I was going to Clemson University. I was studying civil engineering at the time. And one summer on break, me and a couple friends met a guy that was probably in his late 20s, owned several rental properties and was telling my friend at the time just some of the benefits of it. And we soon thereafter found ourselves in unchartered territory. A bookstore. And we left there with a couple real estate investing books. I had never really heard about or thought that you could buy houses with no money down.

But we pretty quickly found ourselves at a couple conferences and bought all of a guy named Lewis Brown's courses and products and systems and just dove into the world of real estate investing. After buying the first house like a few months later, while I was back to school, me and two friends all decided that we were done with college and we did finish out the semesters, but then all moved to Charleston. Just dove in full time and like I've been self employed ever since 2003. Around 2008 I was like, as soon as I started learning about the real estate investing business, I just wanted to spew it and share what I was learning with others. I guess I'm just like a teacher at heart. And so in 2008 I started a blog and that was kind of my, that was my entryway into the, to the infoworld. And really I just figured my plan at first was just to put out good information, you know, articles, videos. And I figured if I did that long enough, something good might happen.

So that eventually evolved. I partnered with a guy named Trevor Mock.

For a few years we partnered and I was the expert behind all of our products and the face of all of our products and services. Trevor was the ran the company and was the real marketer. And when I bought him out in like 2012 or 13, I really wanted to shift the company. I was tired of being the guru. I didn't want to be the face anymore. I was spending more time in the marketing info world, less time in the trenches of real estate. And I was just more passionate at the time of talking about marketing than I was about motivated sellers. And in 2013 I did my first publisher deal where a student, a guy named Justin Wilmot, came to me with the product idea. He wanted to partner, but I had a different idea and that became our first publisher deal where basically with him the vision was just creating a front end product together. He had an idea for a product called 10 Hour Wholesaler based off of some of the methods he was using. I kind of gave him feedback initially and just helped him build it out himself. And then once he went live with it, I sent some Test traffic and it showed signs of life. And so then I struck a deal with him to where my company stepped in. We basically rebuilt the product head to toe. We rebuilt the funnel and all the marketing and copy. And with that scenario, we shared a small percentage of the net revenue from the front end product funnel with them.

And it was a great product. That was really the beginning of a big shift for my company.

And over the years we've created software in house and we've done coaching and we've sold Mastermind and tried different stuff, but really we kind of cloned out another publisher deal in 2016.

That was called Abandoned House Secrets and it was successful as well. And so a couple years ago we finally like looked back at like all the stuff we'd done over the years. Most of the products and services that we created and sell we had done so mediocrely. And our biggest wins were our front end VSL info products. And so we said let's just double down on what we're good at and stop doing all this stuff that we're not good at. And we kind of re envisioned our publishing model to where we really sought to work with another guru business that was already well established in the space that had tons of back end offers, webinars, software, coaching. And so two years ago we kind of reimagined how we'd structure things, how we'd split financial parts of the deal from the front end to the back end. And that's put us on just a super fast growth path over the past two years. And now we're to the point where we're pretty much cranking out a new front end offer every quarter and actually just went live with one last Friday. And so the other one you were.

Showing me earlier, that's.

Yes, yes it is.

I love it. So, yeah, so one of the things I mentioned in the intro is like how you've evolved in that and I like this how you've, you've taken, you said, look, let's get rid of what we're not good at, right? Just, and just focus on what we excel at, which happens to be the front end offers. I also like how you went beyond just lead generation and it's like buyer lead generation. Now you mentioned to me offline before we started really recording that one of the strategies there is that, and maybe you can take us through that because I found this fascinating is that you're not only just generating leads, you're like building out the entire front end and.

Keeping the revenue, but also you're the one who's responsible for the ad spend and cost to generate that. But take my listeners through kind of the model of how it works between you and your publishing client.

Would love to. It is an interesting setup, just kind of how things have evolved and we really. Some of the tweaks we made two years ago now have set us up to where we can really much more effectively scale our offers on cold traffic.

Which is where it's at, which is where we're focused with our publishing model today. Like I said, we look to work with an existing company that already has lots of good offers, converting offers, whether it's coaching software, webinars, higher ticket stuff. We come in and basically look at all their source material. Like if they have existing courses and whatnot. And we like I do this for our team. I go through a guru source material to.

Look for the idea of what we can peel off to the front end to create a smaller version. Maybe somebody has a webinar offer where it's like A to C how to flip properties with auctions or using auctions. You know, maybe we just pull out one little specific deal source for auctions and we build a simple how to do your first auction using Hubzu.

You know what I love about that? So.

One of the ways we met was through my former client and business partner Kent Clothier, who's in the real estate investor space. And I did a version of this. Like my very first entrance, my foot in the door with Kent as a client is he had a webinar called Reverse Wholesaling and it was just all about his strategy, you know, of find the buyers first and then go find sellers, et cetera. But I took his. He had like a two hour webinar but instead of creating a front end product for like an info product, like let's say it's a hundred dollars or whatnot, I turned it into a book. And this was in 2000 and maybe 14 and this Kindle publishing, etc. Relatively early, but we turned it into a Kindle book as well as a physical copy book that we ran free plus shipping offers on. My monetary agreement was totally different. I was a consultant, not a publisher. But it goes along those same lines is like I found something that was really valuable which was the messaging and the training in his webinar and I turned it into a book that was then used and is still used as a massive front end lead generator for him. So I love like there's kind of a parallel there but I like how you took this even further and took ownership of that and said, look, we're going to, we're going to build this out the way we know it'll convert. We're going to create the.

Sales piece, we're going to drive the traffic at our expense. We're going to keep all the revenue on that. But like you mentioned, like if they have a big back end and coaching programs and upsells, et cetera, you get paid a commission on that as well.

Yeah, and I'll explain a little bit more just so everyone here kind of understands. So we'll go in and like once we figure out, once we know who we want to work with, the company and the guru who's going to be the face and we come up with, here's what you know, we think is a good front end product idea, we basically then hit go on the project and typically it takes us about two months to fully build out a brand new front end offer and go live with traffic to a fully operating funnel. And the funnel that we build out, my company keeps 100% of the revenue that's generated like for our services too. Like we don't charge anything up front and we don't charge anything per month. Currently, in essence the payment to the guru company is we're creating a free customer lead.

Of a product who has bought them as the guru. You know, this is, you know, we're basically a customer generation business in essence. And you know, customer acquisition is the toughest thing in this business. Monetizing a lead is much easier. So we take care of the acquisition and then a big, you know, and then a big part of the way that we profit is on the back end through commissions that we're paid on all products and services that are sold to the customers that we send them.

I love that. Do you, do you have an agreement in place that you get to market to the buyers list? So if I'm the client, Brad's real estate guru, and you do this for me and it's like people buy my front end product.

Is your team able to market to the buyer's list as well as me?

Yes, we both own the customer lead and in the past we've never shared the opt ins. So we're also keeping all the opt ins that we're generating. But yeah, the customer lead. Both companies own the right to market to them. We know that if we generated a Brad buyer lead that the best thing to market to them is more Brad products and services. And that's a major way that we're Compensated on back in sales. But then we also sell those people our additional products and services and affiliate stuff.

How do you, how do you structure the messaging.

To them? So if they're coming in to buy my product, right. Are you later on down the road, let's say a month later, two months later, whatever. If you're emailing the customers, are you emailing them as the guru or as a publisher or what's the nuance on that?

When someone buys one of our front end offers, we email them as publisher.

Cool.

And like a lot of like sometimes depending on like if a guru that we're working with has software, a lot of times our how to front end info product, the upsell is their software. And so many times like we're including deliverables that are actually consumed from the guru's backend members area or software. And so a lot of times customers end up having logins to the training program we create through our site and many times through the guru company site as well. If there's certain software or other deliverables that they ended up buying.

Love it, love it. Okay, cool. So what have you found? Let's get into. I love the agreement and the evolution of that. When it comes to creating a solid front end offer like this, let's go over because this really is the holy grail. I want to say. Everything's the holy grail, right? Back end is the holy grail front end. But you know, back end is where majority of a business's money is. The profit is made. But if you don't have a good front end offer to get people in the door, it's, it's a. You could have the best back end in the world. What are some of the key components to creating a high converting front end offer, especially to cold traffic that you found?

Yeah, great question. Like our process.

Whenever I'm looking into a guru's existing content, I mean I'm first looking for what is the topic of the product. And like there was one guy that we worked with where all of his stuff was on lease options. So we already knew going in that the strategy was at least going to be around lease options. In that instance, like in his webinar offer, he taught tons of different Legion tactics and one of the main ones that I found out he used a lot was Zillow. And so we ultimately created a course where the big idea and hook was how to earn income using Zillow with other people's properties.

And so that's just.

Yeah, it's finding that it's finding a good hook and big idea to really capture. I mean it's really everything. I mean that's, that's one of the most underappreciated skills in all the marketing.

It is like, and I've worked with tons of copywriters over the last two years and I would say one of the weakest.

Skills in most copywriters out there is coming up with a unique and compelling big idea that like slaps you in the face when you land on the page and gives you a feeling of huh, like I haven't heard of that before now.

Do you have a process that you follow for that?

I don't really have a process. Just because the last two years now we've cranked out six new front end offers and now we're at a one per quarter pace. Like, I mean, having gone through this so many times now recently, I am developing more of a process and I actually last fall for the first time I taught a two day workshop on creating VSL funnels and scaling them.

Oh, nice.

And so like first I look for the topic, then I look at, okay, well what's the strategy? You know, is it wholesaling, is it quickly turning a contract into cash? Or you know, is it.

Then I look for kind of what is the hook and big idea. And.

Oftentimes I'm coming up with that and handing that off to our copywriter that we hire. Like, I've developed like I'm a good copywriter myself by having went down the rabbit hole and written tons of copy. But now I'm our copy chief and with most of our offers, I'm doing research and looking for what's some unique thing out there or thing in the media that we can frame our opportunity around to make it sound different.

Even now with the offers we're creating, we're trying to design them so that the big idea and the copy initially doesn't even disclose that it's real estate related. And because we really want to get to the point where we're converting biz, op traffic, conservative media, you know, financial type buyers with the traditional financial direct response companies. And so we've been on a mission really the last year of how do we recraft our copy and our branding and stuff with some of our offers to where we can pull in somebody that's not already in real estate and actually get them to buy a real estate offer.

Yeah, no, I love that. I've actually got a couple of frameworks for creating big ideas, by the way. I've Never actually shared them here, but I'll share them with you because this is a fun collaborative experience. So one of the first things I do is I ask a question. And if you guys are listening, you may want to take notes on this because it works fairly well. But it's like, the first thing I go is like, what does your customer actually want, right? Like, what is the benefit you're getting? And then how specifically do you help them get that result?

And then I say, you know, what is or could be? And those are very simple, right? Like, well, what do they want? They want motivated seller leads. Well, how do you promise to get that for them? Right? Well, maybe for instance, it's, you know, we show them how to use Zillow, right? Like that's, this is real basic stuff. And then I ask, you know, what is or could be made to be unique or interesting about your method of getting them results. And this is one, this is probably one of the, it depends on what it is. It could be one of the hardest parts, unless you really do have a unique way that nobody else is doing.

And then at that point, it's just the extraction of the big idea, which is like, how do you put it succinctly in a way that.

Makes them go, oh, shit, I want that. Where I've noticed that the best big idea is not designed to pitch or sell the product. It's designed to just get them to go, ooh, tell me more, right? Like, that's when I had that epiphany of big idea and hook creation. Because before I was just trying to almost encapsulate the entire sales proposition in the, in the headline or the sales hook. And I was like, no, the goal is just to get them salivating to go, that's intellectually stimulating enough or curious enough to make me go, all right, I got to know what you're, what you're talking about. So the, the, a good example of that. P90X has one of the best big ideas and hooks. For those of you guys who aren't familiar with it, they had one called like muscle Confusion was the two word big idea. That was the, in essence, their unique mechanism that made you pay attention. And it's real interesting. It's like, well, what do they want? They want to lose weight? Well, how do you help them get the result? Well, we have a, you know, we have a TV based or online training program. Gives them a whole bunch of different exercises to get, you know, that's real simple. What's unique about that or what's Interesting. And if you. For anybody who remembers what P90X was, what's interesting is that, like, every single day, you're doing something totally batshit crazy and different, right? And you're like, well, why?

Then?

The next question is really important. It's not just unique or different. Why is that better? And it's like, well, now.

You support your premise, which is that a lot of different types of exercises are more effective. Why is that more effective? And you go, well, you know, when the body gets used to doing a certain exercise over time, it adapts. And when it adapts, it stops burning fat. And if you can keep it from adapting and keep your body guessing, then your body works harder and burns more calories. Now, that sounds good. Like that. But what's the hook? What's the title? What's. How do you extract the juice from that? And then, like, I'm assuming they went through this process, but it's like, oh, well, muscle confusion. And now when you flip that on its head, you just invert the formula. And I've got it written down right here. I'm just in my notes, so I'm reading. But it says, you know, what do you want? Oh, I want to lose weight quickly. And then you go, oh, well, what you need is muscle confusion, right? And by the way, this isn't a sales piece, but this is like, you'll know you've got it when this happens. And they go, oh, well, you need to confuse your muscles, or you need muscle confusion. And they go, oh, what's that? Right? Like, tell me more. Because if they don't say that, then that's not really a big unique idea. So then you give them the premise, and this is all just in reverse. You go, oh, well, since your body adapts and stops you from losing fat, you need to keep it from adapting. And here's how we do that. We give you a bunch of different exercises, and as a result, you lose weight quickly. So that's kind of my framework for the big idea. By the way, I think I'll put this in the show notes. If anybody is listening or whatnot, just look in there and I'll send it to you too, if it helps you, Patrick. But I love putting together big ideas for things like this because once you get it, man, you can. You can really, really turn on the heat.

Oh, yeah, no, that's. That. That. That's awesome. And I heard with the P90X that at first their infomercial didn't work until. Until they added the unique mechanism of Muscle confusion. And it's like the unique mechanism for your offer gives people, like, an excuse for why the stuff that they've tried in the past hasn't worked. And it's the reason why they can have success in the future.

Things I thought of while you're talking is.

All the Agora companies are like big idea machines. And I'm.

Oh, yeah, that's huge.

I'm on a bunch of their email lists and I started noticing, just going to look at their VSLs that most of the time they express the big idea in like two to five words. Like, you land on the page and it's just like, boom.

Precisely. Evaldo, Albuquerque, talks a lot about that in his book.

16 word sales letter. And then there's another book that I love. Have you read Great Leads, dude? Love it.

Yeah, Check it out. I got.

Those are two, like, marketing bibles right there.

They are. I love them. Those are both awesome. I like Joe Sugarman triggers.

What is it? Ready, fire, aim.

Oh, ready, fire, aim.

Every direct marketer should. Should read that. Okay. Okay. One more thing that I wanted to mention that has really been a breakthrough for me when it comes to, like, what's the new offer that we're gonna create? And like, I discovered this myself by racking my brain last year when I knew the company and the guru that we wanted to do the offer with. And they've got like a ton of products and services and softwares, but I just couldn't figure out what to peel off to the front end. I mean, they sell tons of software. And I was like, well, we can't really. Our bread and butter is create a how to program on the front end, sell them a system or software in the upsell funnel, and then monetize the leads in the back end, you know, through all the offers the guru has. And we do. But the breakthrough was that I finally was like, where's the proof? Where is the most proof that he has in his business? And it was with his transactional funding. They close like six to eight deals a month. And they. And he's got a real sexy, unique offer with his webinar where he gives you what he calls no fee funding, where you basically pay for access to it in his webinar for a certain amount of funds with no fees, no interest, no points, whatever, and you can use it for a year. I basically had the idea of, hey, Cam, like, what if we sold a smaller version of that and didn't give them up to a million and didn't give them Unlimited access for as many deals as they want in a time frame. What if we just gave him a smaller version like one deal funding certificate where they could legit use his transactional funding with no fees. Plus then we wrapped like a deal source around the funding so that we can create an offer that teaches from front to back how to make money flipping a specific type of real estate deal using his funding. The proof. The proof. The proof is what, like, gave me the idea because like, you know, they close legit 6 to 8 of these a month. They got, they have all the purchase and sale paperwork, they see both HUDs, you know, they know the exact amount that people are profiting and it's just been a gold mine. So. And even like a couple months ago I was listening to some interview on YouTube, copy related, and some Gary, famous Gary copywriter was quoted as saying something like, don't look for new offers, look for the proof. And I was like, oh my God, I like discovered this the hard way last year.

I don't like that though. Yeah, where is the proof? What is.

You know, I don't know if it was Gary Halbert or Gary Benson, but that's a great.

I hadn't actually even thought of that. Like, it's one of those things is like once you hear it, it makes so much sense. Yeah, but I hadn't really thought of that. That's, that's really good. See guys, See listeners, this is why I do this show, so I can learn shit like this.

And our sales letters just cycle between like a section of copy and proof, proof, proof, proof, proof, section of copy, and we just pile it on throughout.

So let's. I want to go into that because when we were scheduling this, you said that you've kind of got a generalized or a specific framework for creating sales videos, et cetera. Like, that's a good segue into kind of your process there. But I do like what you're saying. Like, and I see this more and more often with the really successful letters. Is that proof? They just keep on stopping and throwing proof in there. Keep on stopping and throwing proof. And I never knew for sure if that, if that was like better or if you should throw all the proof in one section. I've never really tested that, but I'd love to hear what you've kind of developed for your framework.

Well, just, just last fall, whenever there was a guy that's been bugging me for a couple years to do a workshop, like a two day workshop, and he's like, I'll do Everything and all you got to do is show up. And so I finally did that this last November. And that forced me to really, to really analyze my processes for offer creation and funnel structure and sequence and copy, you know, coming up with the big idea and the hook and the. And it was really interesting for me just like to figure out what I was doing. And I kind of went back and looked at first our most successful sales letter last year that did a little over two and a half million. That VSL funnel in front end vsl, just funnel sales. I looked at it and then I kind of went back and looked at our other couple offers, our most recent ones, and they all had a little bit like zooming way out. They all had kind of a simple or a similar framework to them. And this is like greatly simplified from everything that's included in a crushing sales letter. But in essence it was like five parts. It was big idea, story, proof, story, offer. And so it was like big idea smacks you in the face. It's unique, it's compelling, it sucks you in. It's different than anything you've ever seen before. And you're like, huh, what is that? And then like you start then next with the story. That's the climactic moment of whatever story you're using in the letter, whether it's the guru story or some student story. And you kind of open with that, that climactic moment. And then quickly, like, you know, a lot of times I'll kind of kind of go through like the big promise there too. But then we transition to proof and it's just like check, check, check, check, check, check, check for our kind of promo, which is all financial related.

And then after like the big proof wall, the first one at least, then we'll loop back to the story and kind of say, then introduce the guru. Hi, I'm so and so guru and let me tell you about, you know, my big story of how this all happened. Then eventually, like as the story kind of develops, eventually.

The fact that it's real estate is introduced, the fact that the specific strategy and the unique mechanism is kind of introduced and explained. And then ultimately like that whole middle section which is mainly story and kind of weaves those elements in, then gets to the offer and going over all the deliverables to finish off the letter.

So do you do much, I guess, teaching in the VSL of the teach the what, sell the how, or is it really just much more story driven as opposed to. Okay, step one, this, this.

I don't, I don't feel like we're teaching anything. I mean maybe some people could come away with with a little bit but it is very story story driven and then just kind of integrating all the typical things that you see in sales letters throughout each section.

I love it. Now what about what are some other little tips and tricks for getting the front end offer to convert? Well besides just having really good like obviously a really good offer and sales copy is a key part, are there any other things that you like? For instance? For instance and you sent me one of your I'm not going to share this to the world unless you wanted me to but. But you privately shared one with me. There's no opt in on that page. Like for instance for a cold traffic to a front end offer that I'm guessing is like a hundred dollars or less. Do you do opt ins beforehand or.

No, it depends on the traffic source. Like the page I sent you is just the VSL page for that offer and with internal traffic and affiliate traffic that goes direct to a VSL. With Facebook and YouTube we go lead gen and send to opt in pages. And then with native ads we've had a lot of success with Yahoo. Gemini native ads with our offers with some specific audiences. We send those to an advertorial and then people click through straight to the vsl.

Nice. You know one of my businesses that I'm a partner in called vitaminpatchclub.com ladies and gentlemen, go get your vitamin patches.

We've been doing started doing advertorials, getting them written. Now we're starting them off on just like Facebook just to try it out. We haven't sent them to like Gemini or anything yet. But have you liked that Yahoo. Gemini for advertorials? Has it been real?

Well man, it's like we've done a tiny bit of testing through another native ad network but.

We tested long enough and spent enough to finally figure some stuff out. And like it took us a little while. Like at first we sent the native ad traffic direct to VSL just thinking maybe if we skip any kind of pre frame page we get more people there and maybe it'll convert. Did not convert. Then we tried going to the landing page kind of like we were doing with our other paid traffic on Facebook and YouTube and that didn't work. So then we wrote a couple advertorials and started testing that kind of all the while we're testing different audiences and we finally found this really ninja way that you can create audiences through Yahoo. Gemini basically targeting certain companies, email Subscribers. Because Yahoo knows what email lists people are subscribed to and the parent company owns AOL and they may own other ESPs. But in essence, like if you figure out the sending from domain that people send their broadcast messages from, you can, you can create audiences from other people's email lists.

Okay, that's a record scratch moment.

It's. It is. I couldn't believe it when we finally found that you could do that.

And then like that's so backing up a little bit.

If baconwrappedbusiness.com was.

I'm not sending tons of offers, etc. Like that, but let's just say I've got an active email list and I'm mailing them a lot. You could potentially go in and create an audience based off of my newsletter.

Based on. Based on all the people that they know are subscribed to your lists and they know, they know a lot of lot of people because they like Yahoo.com.

Like if people have like Bob@yahoo.com and Jim@aol.com et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I guess they can probably, huh.

It's the most ninja targeting cool traffic hack that I've never shared and now I have. And I hope that other real estate investor companies aren't listening to this and copy.

Well, you know, I'm going to follow up with you privately and we're going to. You're going to show me.

It's sick, man. Like that's been our best converting traffic all fall. We kind of struggled with the presidential election. Soaking up ad inventory.

Sure, yeah.

Black Friday and Christmas. And finally recently our other traffic sources are like looking better, but the native ads kind of crushed the whole way. And man, before I forget a couple of other things on the copy side of things, if that's okay. Yeah, like one of the reasons why I feel like our letters have so consistently done well is because every single one of them is a team. There's a team.

That gets the job done. And like I mentioned off the.

I was gonna ask you what your team looks like. That's actually one of the questions.

I've probably worked with 10 different copywriters or more over the past two years. And there's been a couple products where initially we hired two different copywriters to both write VSL scripts so that we could have two to start with. Or.

Like so many times when I've hired copywriters, I get to the point where I can't get the letter to where I want it and we take it in house. You know, fortunately, like, I've learned enough about copywriting where I'm confident in me and also Matt on my team, like, in times of need, we take a letter in house and we finish it, pass it back and forth. But so many times it's a team effort. Like, there are. There's one woman, that's Cindy, that's written a couple letters for us, and she has killed it. She wrote the most recent one. We barely edit her letters most of the time. It's an active process of working with a copywriter. Sometimes we'll bring in somebody, do a copy review. And so we've got me as copy chief. We've got the copywriter, and then we do, like, a copy review call with, like, Roy Fur or there's a couple other people that I've used in the past.

You know, I do hate hiring copywriters. It is so frustrating. I mean, but there's nothing better than when you get one and it just works. And it's like, oh, my God, that just takes so much off my plate, because I like the copy chief, but I'd hate writing copy from scratch. But I also.

This is one of those things that I'm trying to also figure out is just a really good way to vet them and flush them out without spending way too much money on them. Because I've done that in the past. I'm sure we all have. You have a good concept, and you try to lay out what you want, and then no matter how much other work you've seen them do, that doesn't necessarily translate into succeeding on your stuff. And I've just been disappointed more often than not with trying to hire good copywriters. I don't know.

It's really tough to think, like, a lot of people think that you can hire a copywriter, leave them in a silo by themselves, and eventually have a killer that's hard to do and hard to find.

So, I mean, I suggest to anybody out there, as hard as it is and as long as it takes, like, learn to write copy yourself. I mean, until you can write decent copy yourself, you can't even recognize good copy. But, you know, collaboration has been huge for me. Like, our most successful letter last year was the handiwork of four copywriters. It was the guy we first hired, then it was me and Matt, and we also brought in Roy for a review. So it was, you know, a hodgepodge of four minds coming together to make it work. I was gonna mention this, too. I also, like, a couple years ago, decided I wanted to level up the kind of copywriters we work with. And I was like, I'm tired of paying five grand for a sales letter. I want to pay a lot and expect lot. And so now we pay.

13,000 for a sales that are. I've paid 18,000 for a VSL and 20,000 for a VSL.

Where have you found a good amount of your best copywriters, man?

A lot of times referral. You may not remember it, but you.

Auto.

Yeah, Otto Auto worked for us for about a year and a half. Yeah, auto's awesome.

Yeah, auto's great.

That was before our kind of breakthrough in how we do all of our publishing deals now, the last couple of years. But like Ben Settle has emailed his email players for us before.

We've gotten some referrals from Justin Goff, copy accelerator guys for some ad copying creatives, but really mostly referrals. That's good.

Yeah, same here, Same here. I've got a few that I like and I've worked with in the past, but just in general.

It can be really challenging.

It is really tough, man. It's a beast. I always hope and pray when I see the sales letter for the first time that it's not crap.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, exactly. That's the worst. Well, do you do any kind of tests to say, okay, if you haven't worked with somebody in the past and you've got a new offer coming out.

I don't know, make money on in real estate, for instance, do you do any kind of tests with them just to make sure, like write a lead for me or write this or that before you go? Just send them down the whole path.

We look at whatever existing work that they're willing to show us. Letters they've written, copy that they've written.

Do you have them try to come up with hooks or do you try and big ideas or do you try to come up with that and then give it to them?

I usually try to come up with it myself and give it to them because even the way we name our products, like, we try to name them in a way where you can't tell it's real estate. It's got like mystery intrigue behind it and sometimes it like becomes the hook. Like with our newest offer, the product name became the big headline we led with years ago.

Back when I was first starting in info marketing, a lot of my listeners know that my very first digital product was a course on how to use magic tricks to.

You know, pick up women without looking like a goofy Magician. I don't. Did you ever know that? That was my first product.

Say it on a pot. One of your podcasts before.

Yeah. And it was. Yeah, it was really just designed to.

You know, break the ice without looking cheesy. So one of the, like, I registered a URL. This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I registered a URL.

The site was called, like, Puma P U M A Skills. It stood for Pickup Magic Artist. Now, granted, if you came to pumaskills.com, you didn't. You had no idea what that was. So some people that. And that was purposeful, right? Like, it wasn't called magictrics for pickupartists.com, but it was designed to make them go like, huh? Like, what is that? You got my attention. But then one of the things I did years into that is I created a. Because it started to get well known in that industry for what it was like whenever they came to a Puma Skills page, they knew basically what it was going to be talking about. But so I registered weird way to attract women dot com. And then I put the VSL there and there was very little headline or whatever. It was kind of a blind offer. And it took a little while before I got into the fact that, oh, yeah, and it's using magic tricks. But that didn't quite double conversion, but almost. I think it was like, you know, 80% bump on conversion just by doing that. Because people are like, well, what's this weird way to attract women?

So that's pretty cool, man. That's awesome.

All the little tips and tricks. Patrick, since you've been a listener, you know that one of the questions I love to ask is, what's a nut you're trying to crack in your business right now? And, you know, nuts to crack. I mean, those could be a skill you're trying to learn. A person you're trying to meet money, you're trying to raise clients, you're trying to get anything that's not just like, oh, I just want more. But is there anything specifically that whether myself or my listeners could be like, oh, man, I can totally hook this guy up.

I would say that the biggest thing that comes to mind is our team and building our team for the future. Like, we're actively on the lookout for talent.

What kind of talent are you looking for right now?

Has a talent that could add to our product side of the business or the marketing side of the business. Whether you're a do graphic design or you're video production or You're a copywriter, media buyer, split tester, whatever you do. We're growing fast and like.

We'Re not like Gary Vee, crush it mentality. I'm like, lifestyle, I work 25 hours a week mentality. And we're scaling the business.

Yeah, I love that. By the way, I've got a guy that is really. He's Filipino, really good at like, click funnels.

Stuff. I don't know if you're building much inside clickfunnels at the moment, but he's part of our team. The only problem is we have to let him go only because we have somebody else coming full time who is just gonna be too much. But he's really good. I hate to let him go, but.

That it may be valuable. Right now I got Matt on our team, sets up everything in clickfunnel funnels. But he needs less and less on his plate and so he can work on higher and higher value.

If you ever want an intro once, you know, once this guy's off our team, I'll afford you. It's always good to have a good resource. And for anybody else who's interested, hit me up.

Sounds good. Sounds good. And I mean, if anybody's interested in reaching out to me, I'm not really active on social. I don't post hardly anywhere. Few times a year, maybe on Facebook, I'm there. I lurk a little.

This 2020 has been the best thing in the world for my social media consumption. Like, it just, you know, it's like, it's like that toxic cesspool you step in. You're like, yeah, there's nothing here. I'm getting off of here. I'm going to build my business.

Is it okay for me to just give out an email address?

Absolutely. Email address, Social Security number, PIN number, phone number?

Well, if you live in Bitcoin wallet, if you live in Charleston, hit me up and let's grab a beer. But you can email me@patrickawesomerei.com and that's, that's the best. And I'll also say at the same time, I'm not that good at email. Like, if I don't reply, don't take it personally, but that is the best place to reach out to me.

Yeah, that's awesome. Rei.com.

What?

What? Is there anything else big next on your plate besides this? Or is this just like, now? We think we've got a good business model and now it's just time to kind of grow it?

Like, like, I finally, for a few Years, we had hit a plateau of revenue, and I was getting more and more frustrated because we were adding more people and the profit was shrinking and we weren't growing the top line. And, like, with our business model and like now with how we structure things and all the stuff we stop doing, I mean, everything we sell is digital. We sell no services. We sell no done for you. Like, the way we generate traffic to sell through our sales funnels. Digital products that are provided on the back end, like, whether we sell 100 or 100,000, like, yeah, we've got to beef up the support team. We've got to buy, you know, hire more media buyers and copywriters. But.

We'Ve got a very scalable thing we've got going on. And, I mean, we grew by over 300% last year, and we think we can almost double this year. So I'm just kind of hanging on for the ride. I'm finally, like, super excited about the business and what we're doing.

That's fun to get reinvigorated with that stuff, man.

You know, it's full ups and downs. I've been an entrepreneur for 18 years, and there's ups and there's downs, and the highs are high and the lows are low, low. I've been through it all. Every bad thing that can happen, you know, I've pretty much been through. And right now things are good. So that's exciting. But, you know, just trying to hold on for the ride.

I love it. I love it. Well, Patrick, I really appreciate you being a guest on the show today. That brings us to the end of the episizzle. As mentioned, our podcast doesn't have episodes. We've got epic sizzles because they too damn hot in the hot tub.

I should have kept my native ad secret. My native ad hack secret. My marketing guy founds out I shared it. Anybody in the real estate niche, well.

You didn't share how to do it, so that's true.

And they. And they still have to figure out the funnel side, which.

They have to figure out the funnel. And they have to have listened to the point in this show, because some people. I do that, too. I'll start a podcast. Something will come up olive left. So there's only going to be a portion. You're going to hear that gem. But I actually do want to follow up with you on the basics of that. I will keep it super quiet, but because we are starting to run native ads, but we have not done them on native ad networks yet. We've just done the native copy style that and this for the vitamin company. I really do want to hear from you kind of what to do on that because that's one of our big next steps.

I'm an open book, man. I'll show you everything we're doing.

Love it. Love it. Well, Patrick, that brings us to the end. If.

I'll follow up with you later, we'll schedule something. And I just really appreciate your time here today. If y' all are still listening, I want you to hit the subscribe button if you're on one of the podcast apps. And if you leave a review.

I will be greatly indebted to you. And I read them all, every single one of them. So please leave a review on itunes. It helps other people understand why they should listen to the show. And if you're not a subscriber to the new newsletter, go over to baconratbusiness.com and jump on the newsletter and hit Patrick up if you are looking for some opportunities on his team, as he mentioned Patrick, awesome. Rei.com let him know you heard him on here. And Patrick, thanks again. Appreciate your time, brother.

Thanks for having me, man. This was fun. I love talking marketing copy, you know, funnel stuff. So this. This was good times.

Absolutely. All right, see you guys on the next episode.