Ben Adkins — How To Create And Launch A New Product In 4 Days

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf, and Joe Finn.

Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Joe and I are laughing here because every time I hit record, we always sit here and debate who's gonna do this intro?

Who's gonna say something first?

And so Joe's like, am I going or are you going? And then we both started laughing. Right. As a hit record. Anyway, anyways, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name's Matt Wolf. I'm here with my partner, Joe Fear. Hi. And. And this podcast is really starting to blow up. Have you noticed that?

No, I didn't.

Yes.

Hell, yeah, I noticed it. It's amazing. It's insane.

Like, every month, we've doubled our previous month, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

So I love it because this is our most fun part of our business, is to just share the wisdom of these people that we bring on these experts in their own right. And this is. It's like the purpose, I mean, you've heard us say it before, is to show you a totally different way of thinking, a different way to work, live, do anything. You know, crush your goals, all that stuff in a good.

Don't crush your dreams.

Smash through them. But that's exactly what we're doing. And like Ben here, Dr. Ben Adkins that we speak to in just a minute here, definitely showed you a variety of ways you can put this stuff into action.

Oh, yeah, no, this was an amazing episode we're about to dive into. Joe and I, obviously, we always talk whenever we're not recording, we always talk. If there's, like, one thing in our business, if somebody would just, like, pay us enough money to survive, and we only did one thing, and it would be this podcast. And episodes like today's exemplify why. Cause this is just a really, really effing good episode. We talked to Ben about. Well, we get his backstory. He actually started as a chiropractor, got into social media marketing, and then, you know, grew that into, like, a really thriving online business. But we'll let him tell that story. But what we really dive deep on in this episode is product creation. We dive rapid, really deeply into his exact process. I on how he rapidly creates products. Now. There was like, a year period, and I talked about this on the episode where it seemed like every month he had a new product coming out. And I asked him about that, and he said, you know, what? We've got it so systematized. We've got a way that we can just crank out high quality products that our customers want over and over and over again and they consistently sell well. And we said cool, let's break down that process. And that's really the bulk, the meat of this conversation that we chat about today.

And we'll touch also on his traffic. We're gonna probably do a round two or we will do a round two to dig deeper on that. But yeah, product creation, I mean the way that Ben does it is totally unique. I've never heard of it done this way and it's something you could totally swipe after listening to this.

Also, real quick, I just wanna give a shout out about our contest. Depending on when you're listening to this. We are running a contest right now to grow more podcast subscribers. We're giving away access to our portal membership. It's a $2,000 a year membership. We're giving away access to three winners. We're also giving away some life licenses to ThriveCart. We're giving away some Apple Air EarPod. AirPods.

EarPods.

Air AirPods. I think they're called AirPods. Anyway, we're giving away all this stuff. It's like almost a $5,000 value that we're giving away in this contest that we're doing. We'll link to the contest in our show notes of our page. But basically we, we want people to subscribe to this podcast. We want people to leave reviews on this podcast and we're willing to, to pay you to thank you for it by doing this contest.

Especially if you want some Apple dongles hanging out of your ear.

Some Apple dongles. So anyway, we're doing that contest. The contest is running through the month of August, so depending on when you're listening to this, you might be eligible to join the contest. There's not a lot of entrance yet, so your chances are great. Where do they go?

Matt?

I'm gonna link to it. I don't know the link right off the top of my head. I think it is evergreenprofits.com podcastcontest or podcast giveaway.

Let's do podcast contest.

Well, it's already a link so it's one of those two. But I'll make sure it's links. Podcast contest, links to it. Anyway, enough with this intro. This is probably the longest intro ever. Let's jump in with Ben Adkins. You're going to love it. Hey Ben, thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing today?

I'm doing good. How are you?

We're doing great. Really looking forward to this one. I think you and I actually go way back. I think we've known each other for probably seven or eight years now. Did some projects together with Josh Bartlett a while back, created some content together there and, you know, kind of been in and out of contact over the last few years. So I'm really excited to catch up and find out what you're up to these days.

I'm excited. In terms of Internet stuff, we are like the old guard, I mean, if you really think about it. So, I mean, even though it's been a short period of time in real world, in Internet speaking, we are sort of the old guard. It's nice to get to hang out with friends anytime that you get the chance. So thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

So let's dive in and get a little bit about your backstory. Let's find out how you sort of got into the Internet marketing world. And I know you started as a chiropractor or were you a marketer and then a chiropractor and then back to market? Let's hear the progression, let's hear the story.

I mean, if I really look at it, I was always a marketer, but I sure didn't consider myself that. I totally fell into this world by complete accident.

I went to school, I was interested in healthcare, and when I was really little, I had a great chiropractor that I went to that I was having headaches in the second or third grade and they were really bad and I was going to medical doctors, things like that. And my mom was freaking out and nobody was able to figure out what was going on. And everybody was like, well, he's just stressed. I'm like, I'm a third grader, how stressed can I be?

It was one of those things where I went to a chiropractor, I think twice, and my headaches were completely gone and they really never came back like that. So when I kind of got into what I was going to do with my life, healthcare was the first aim because I really enjoyed helping people in that way. And then chiropractic, my path sort of came back to me and I toured a school and I was like, yeah, this is my path. And so I got into that. And you know what you fail to realize when you're young and starry eyed is that once you get out and open your doors, that not everybody's just going to rush through the door. And I also made the fatal flaw of not budgeting too much of my startup money for marketing. And so I didn't have a whole lot of cash to go around. I was a chiropractor. I was in a town that had probably seven other chiropractors in a town that probably could only support three. And, yeah, and what ended up happening was I turned to the only thing I had, which was time and the Internet. And because I wasn't real busy when I opened my door that first week, it was one of those things where I would sit on Facebook and I would test things out. And I started really getting into how do I get the word out without being a shilling for my business all the time? And, you know, the funny thing that I discovered is I rarely even talked about my business. And my business grew with some of the strategies that I used to grow my office. And, you know, the standard thing that happens. And how did I get from there to here? Right.

From there, I had all these other local businesses around me that started saying, hey, what you're doing seems to be working. Within, like, six months, I had a chiropractic practice that was as big as, you know, anybody else that was chiropractor in town. And so other people started coming to me, you know, restaurants, lawyers, all kinds of folks. And they were like, how do you do this? And so I started taking on jobs. I had, like, one of these little, you know, agencies. You know, I didn't know it was an agency at the time. I was just like, well, if I'm going to be there, I might as well get paid. And actually, I wish that was my idea. My wife said, if you're going to be there and not at home, you better get paid if it's not the practice. So, you know, and bless her that, you know, so that started that. What ended up happening, though, is my process practice got so busy that I couldn't take on any other clients. I thought this was revolutionary at the time. It absolutely wasn't. I started writing down the stuff that I was doing that was working so that when I couldn't take on a client personally, I could at least sell them something to show them how to do it. Then one day I looked up and I had a business because this stuff started taking off. People were sharing it with their friends, pointing people to the pages where we had it up for sale. I looked up and I had a business that was probably 10 times as big as my chiropractic practice, where we were teaching people what we were doing in my chiropractic practice to grow it. And so for the next couple years I did both and it worked out really well. And then one day I realized I had a sort of a greater calling to go teach more people how to do their marketing using the Internet. And that's sort of what got me to this point. Now I love it.

It's so cool and fascinating every time we talk to. Because we have a. We know a lot of chiropractor entrepreneurs that have a very similar story to yours. And it's weird that it's like, it's usually chiropractors that do exactly what you just did. Like, they're, they're like scrappy. They figure out the marketing, usually it's online based. And then they like just get so damn busy that they have to shut their practice down or they create something online like you just said.

I tell you, it was crazy. I ended up hiring someone to help me. And I just, I kept showing up less. I don't think I ever actually quit.

I just kept showing up less. And one day I looked up and realized I'd not been there in two months. And it's funny how it works out, but yeah, I think the chiropractors, it's funny because you have to sort of be anti establishment and entrepreneurial to even think about going into that. So it's funny how you're right. I know a lot of chiropractors too, that have sort of taken that path. And I think it's because of sort of what gets you into it in the first place.

And I love that your main business now came as a byproduct from your other business too. That's something that I feel we tend to hear a lot with really, really successful businesses is that the business they're in isn't the business they started in the business they're in spun from a problem they had in the business they started in. You know what I mean? So, like for you, you, you started your chiropractic business and then one of the byproducts that you discovered was, I'm really good at putting people through the door into my chiropractic business. I could sell this, you know, with, with someone like Josh Bartlett, a mutual friend of all of ours. You know, he had Josh, you know, he was putting out products and stuff, and he couldn't find a really good way to embed videos that were protected, that weren't freely available on YouTube. And he went, this is a pain in the butt. What can I do to solve this? And he made easy Video player. You know, it seems like a lot of the really, really great businesses are spun up as byproducts of something else they're trying to do. And then this pivot happens, and then all of a sudden you. You know, you hit the magic. The magic land of what you were meant to do.

The magic land.

Well, and I think we all wish we were so clever that we could just come up with this stuff off the top of our head. But no, I mean, like, the stuff that whenever I try to get clever and create something that I think other people will be into, it falls on its face, period. And so you just kind of give up on that. Because the things that really seem to go well is exactly what you guys said. It's the problems you're facing every day as you're trying to get your other work done, that that's where the cool products, the cool systems come from.

Yeah. And it's almost like what people are guiding you to do, you know?

Yeah.

People are yelling. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. It's not even like whispers. It's like, dude, doofus, get over here. Stop doing that thing. You're trying. You're pushing too hard.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in our scenario, one of the things that people kept on telling us to do is make a traffic course. Make a traffic course. Make a traffic course. We've made a ton of courses. We've been really good at affiliate marketing and driving traffic. And that was the one thing we couldn't ignore anymore because people kept on coming to us saying, hey, do you teach how you do this traffic stuff? And that was our latest product, and it's probably been our most successful product to date. So it's just interesting how that works. I do have. I do want to dig in real quick on. On your actual story. What kind of things were you doing to bring people through the door at your chiropractic office? You know, what. What kind of things?

How about things that were slightly different than the masses? Like what the other chiropractors were doing. Something unique.

It's so dumb. You know, at the time, I thought it was dumb. Now I look at, you know, what celebrities do online and what they share. You know, you see these people that have become Internet celebrities or they were in one or two movies, and they're a huge celebrity online now. And, like, now it starts to make sense that we've seen sort of all this rise. But at the time, there was not that many models as to how this works. So I just thought this was strange. So what I was Doing is I kind of had a rule because I learned early on this stuff didn't work. If I talked about chiropractic on my Facebook page for my business, or I talked about chiropractic on my personal Facebook wall, it didn't really go that well. It's not like people were waiting around to hear that stuff. Right. What they were into was what I was doing with my day. And let me just say, I think I live one of the most boring lives. I think I live one of the most boring lives back then. But people were sort of into what was sort of the behind the scenes. It was a very voyeuristic type of thing. So what I ended up doing is on my personal wall, I did a lot of, hey, this is where I'm going to eat lunch today. And I would take a picture of my food and like, you know, that's the standard, oh, my God, stop posting food. Right. But that was it. And when I would, you know, when I would to, like a chamber of commerce function or a Lions Club meeting or a charity event, I take pictures. I would talk about it before I went. I'd take pictures, I'd talk about it after. And so what was really interesting is I sort of became the promotion engine for the town that I was in. If you wanted to know sort of what was going on, you paid attention to my page because I was always doing something.

I like it.

And what ended up happening was people, without even coming through the door, started to say, hey, I feel like I know this guy, you know, and they started sending people my way. And we, you know, in the office, we'd have something, we'd say, okay, how did you find us? They were like, oh, so and so referred me. And I'd be like, okay, is that a patient? You know, and then I'd go, look. And I'm like, no, it's just a Facebook friend.

That's crazy.

Yeah. So on a very personal level, you know, one of the things that we teach a lot of our folks how to do now is just the person that you're working with. Yes, you can do all these core things, but just getting them to carry their phone with them and take the occasional picture during the day is extremely powerful because it humanizes things. So that was a very early lesson for me. And at the time, I had no idea why it was working. But now where we are with the Internet, it starts to make a lot of sense.

And it's interesting. Yeah. Because like you said back then, not a lot of people were Doing that, it was maybe like, you'd probably get more flack, like, hey, what's this guy freaking taking pictures of his food all the time. What a weirdo. But now, I mean, yeah. And still to this day, I feel like a local business, or if you're in a niche and you still do that, you kind of share the behind the scenes. It's a branding play. It's making you feel human or look human. Well, it's that trust, you know.

Exactly. And a really interesting story on that. And this is something that everybody can go steal. There was a particular restaurant that I went to at least two, three times a week because it was sort of the lunch spot, right. And they. They started picking up on this. They started picking up on the fact that I was always there, that I was always promoting them, you know, without thinking I was promoting. I was always promoting them. And they came to me a little bit down the road and said, hey, you're very health conscious. Would you like to have your face on a handout that we're doing in the restaurant? That's sort of our healthy menu. And it'll be a nice, really well put together thing. And if you talk about it in your practice and you showcase it, we'll put your face on it. And so I had a restaurant, the busiest restaurant in town, during lunchtime for the business crowd that basically had a menu at every register with my face on it. Dear God. And it was one of those. It was just seriously, that came about because they started seeing things on the Internet that I was doing and they wanted to basically leech off what I was doing. And I was more than willing to let them do that because they had a good establishment, number one. But number two, just because I knew that everybody that hit that cash register saw my face and knew where I was. So it worked out really well. And the things that it led to, this Internet posting, my food, the silliness of it, led to a lot of things.

So it seems like you've always had this mindset of a good blend of not only just direct response, because I'm sure there was a lot of that.

Oh, sure, you do a lot of that.

But then you have that branding element where, yeah, you can't quite track how many people saw your face and turned into a patient or a client, bought your stuff, but with that perfect blend, because this is what we do as well. And a lot of people get stuck in one or the other. I'm a branding guy, I'm a direct response guy. It's like, dude, mash it together, you know?

Yeah.

The thing about, the thing about building a brand is it makes direct response easier. If you have a brand where people just recognize your face when they hit your landing page and they see that face, they're like, oh, I know this guy, he does good shit. And that brand supports the direct response. Like it's an. It's sort of intangible. It's really hard to quantify. But we can show that over the years, as we focused on growing our brand, our conversion rates also increase sort of proportionately.

Crazy how that works, right? And that's the thing. And what I started to realize, and I think this was the big take home point, and I still forget this to this day sometimes, and it bothers me because I'm like, you have to open up, is I started to realize that if you will just work your butt off to build the celebrity of other people, you know, with your core group, then those other people very often will work to build up your celebrity and your brand with their core group. And it becomes a very symbiotic sort of thing very quickly.

Hence the reason we have a podcast.

Yeah, there you go, right?

That is very true. I was like, yeah, you can go do some content for other people or show a testimonial, but it's like, yeah, podcast is actually the easiest.

Podcast all the day. I love it.

So now where are you at in your story and your journey? Because you've done a lot since that time. You've turned from.

Yeah, so, yeah, you know, I got into. I very. I very much started off, you know, exactly what I said. I started off teaching people. This is how you build a brick and mortar business. You know, no matter what your brick and mortar business is, these are the sort of the core skills that you can apply to that. And what I started noticing along the way, you know, other things became very important, like email marketing and showing other people how I create the, you know, the information products that I put together. Because that's the other thing that grew out of it. People were like, well, you know, you're putting together these products and you've never really taught anybody how to put together these products, which seems really silly to me, but I started teaching that a little bit. So I got into this sort of community and I started teaching people, hey, if you want to get into this community too, this information community, this is how you do it. And what you find with that is. And this is the core. Hard truth is there are very few people that want to be on Camera or on the mic or writing blog post as much as us weirdos, right? Like, we are a rare breed, and it's just what we enjoy. But you start to find that there's a lot of people that. That is very uncomfortable for them. So I thought, you know, in the last two, three years, I thought, what can I do to help people that want to work from home, but they don't want to be, you know, the person that is like, the big celebrity in the business. They just want to deliver good services, help other people out, and make a lot of money without having to go to a job every day. And so I got back to sort of my roots. I'm like, man, how cool would it have been when I was doing my thing in my chiropractic office if I'd have had somebody that was providing this service and then this service? What if I had somebody that had these five things that they could have done for me and they knew how to scale it in a way where they weren't having to charge me an arm and a leg? So that's sort of where things started to get into. I'm like, okay, if I'm going back to my chiropractic office, what are the things that I wish were designed for me that would help my office grow, take care of the stuff that I had to do but didn't want to do, and get it going? What would I pay for even having a lot of marketing knowledge at this point? What would I still pay somebody to do if I was back in that office? We started putting those things together. At first it was just for dentists and chiropractors because my wife is a dental hygienist, by the way. That's another really important niche for me. And then I started having really good conversations with real estate agents and with plastic surgeons and plastic surgeon staff, and they were interested. So what I did was. This was tough. I started looking for something really simple. I was like, what's the thing that I hated to do the most that I needed to do more of? And it was post on social media every day. I mean, like, I'm not always going to a great restaurant where I can post food, so what is it that I could do so I could post on social media in the morning and the afternoon every day? And I knew that was something that would absolutely help my business. Even back then I knew that, but I didn't have the ability to do it. So what I did was I started. I really got simple. And I said, what if I could go in and I could put together 180 social media posts for a chiropractor that were just beautiful. And you could put a brand on it for that practice, and you could sit down and you could put down for three months, two posts a day, and you could rotate them after they got to the end of it. So two posts a day for three months, and at the end, it starts rotating back to the beginning. And I thought, would that be something that's super helpful for most of the chiropractors I have? I mean, it's not like a. It's going to get 100 new patients through the door a month, but it knocks out a thing. And what I started finding out was there are chiropractors that I know that were paying $500 to $1,000 a month for somebody to post two times a week on their social media page.

Social media managers.

Yeah, yeah. And so what I did was I started going out and saying, talking to my chiropractor friends from back in school, I was like, is this something that you'd be interested in if I could offer it for 100, 200 bucks a month and two posts a day? And they were like, yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah. And so I started doing that. I started with dentists. I started with several of them. We built up this nice little agency of just doing super simple stuff like that that people knew they needed to do because it actually does provide a bit of it. Even with Facebook sort of knocking page stuff down, it still provides a huge benefit to the business. And we started building up an agency kind of on the side of $100 to $200 a month clients. And right away I'm like, okay, well, now I have to teach the folks that don't want to be the Internet stars how to do that. And so we started teaching that model of, hey, how do you franchise out social media post? How do you franchise out Facebook funnels to get people through the door? And what was just striking to me is people that had been with me trying to do certain things for years, and they just couldn't quite make it work. Not because of effort, just because it didn't fit their personality. They started taking this particular thing and they were running with it, and they were quitting their jobs.

Because they had the recurring income coming in. And so that sort of going back to what I wanted as a chiropractor. And I wish was there. And then proving that model and then giving that model to other people and letting them prove it for themselves. That's where I was like, okay, I really need to put a lot of time in this. The last year and a half, I've really dedicated myself into sort of building turnkey packages for local businesses that Internet entrepreneurs could go sell them. That's been a really good relationship with me and my customers, but also all of the businesses they serve. So it's kind of that triple win. And that's what you're always looking for when you do this.

That makes sense. And I think what you're saying, what I'm hearing a lot of is like, you're just niching down like crazy.

Yes.

And you're not taking that wide approach that a lot of people that maybe focus just on purely Internet marketing, but the fact that this thing stemmed from a necessary need from your chiropractic business, it morphed into still where you're still niche down.

Well, we go super niche too. And I think that's the thing most people miss is like, we're going into, of course, chiropractors, dentist, and that's pretty niche. But, you know, I like if I'm taking on a client or I'm telling other people to what to look for when they look for a client, I'm looking for the chiropractor that is only serving pregnant ladies, you know, or knees, like, is just the expert at knees. And I think when you start to find people that understand that, and as an agency, you know, person that has an agency, it's helping people. When you start finding those kinds of people, those are the people that, man, they, they don't need much help understanding why they need to keep paying you for the next five to ten years every single month.

Yeah.

And I think there's a, there's a simple lesson there that I think is also a very, very important lesson that you went out, you found businesses, you sort of knew the inside information around these businesses. You knew their biggest pain points, and you said, what can I provide for people that's going to sort of knock this pain point away for them and, you know, make something monthly off of it? And I think it's. It's such a simple concept, but something most people don't think about. Most people go into things thinking, what can I do to make money? Right. They're. They're putting that as their first focus. What opportunities are out there for me to make money? Where you took the approach of, okay, I know this industry, what struggles do they have? How do I solve that that they'd willingly pay me for? Yeah.

And I think that you know, one of the big things that was going on around the time that I really started getting hardcore in this is there was all these people that were teaching online marketers that, hey, Go sell a $3,000 or $1,000 a month Facebook ads package to get patients through the door. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. That stuff works. We teach it. But let me tell you, going into a business the first time and pitching that versus pitching something that's 100 to 200 bucks, that solves something that they already want solved and saves them money on something they're already paying for to solve that problem, that's the foot in the door. And what we found that was so interesting is those particular customers of ours that were paying US$100 to $200 a month, those are the ones that would pick up the phone because they loved what we were doing and say, hey, do you do this Legion stuff? We're paying this other person, like a ton of money over here and they're not getting us the results we want. Do you do that or would you try? And so that led us to a lot of higher ticket sales because we came through with something that solved a problem that was very much at the core. And it's just like you said, solving the problem that was already there instead of trying to come in and invent something.

Yeah. I mean, it's a perfect model to just work them up the ladder, you know, and it's just grow that immediate trust, squash that issue that they had, and then take them up the ladder. I mean, that's where. Yeah, I think a lot of agencies, because we know a ton of them, we used to be one as well. And.

It'S tough when you're out there because like you said, you almost took like, the contrarian approach you saw. What's the comment?

Yeah, I mean, like, honestly, it came from a stress level thing for me. I just. I wanted something that I could literally make the sale, turn on a piece of software to do the majority of the work for me, and check in once a month, call them once a month, but literally never look at after that and then still be happy. Now, let me tell you, it took me a while to figure out how to do that, but once I did, it was something that a lot of people gravitated towards, and I didn't have to change my lifestyle to make sure that we were bringing the heat for somebody. I love it.

Now I'm gonna change the subject a little bit here for a minute.

Sure.

So one thing that I've always thought about you, when I see your name on Facebook and see what you're doing, I'm on your email. One thing I've always thought about you is that you are an absolute machine when it comes to product creation. There was a stretch where I felt like it was like a year where you had a new course or software or some sort of product pretty much like every month. And it just. And it was all high quality stuff. It wasn't like slapped together. Hey, I'm just gonna crank junk out. It was like high quality, polished, like good shit. And it was like really consistent. And that's something I want to kind of touch on. Do you have like a system or process or, you know, what's your kind of strategy behind product creation and, you know, the frequency, all that kind of thing?

Well, number one, I'm not a big believer in putting out a product just to put out a product. One of the big things about actually doing this stuff in the real world is a lot of products pop up. And that's the thing. I think a lot of people look at what I do and they're like, oh, my God, that stressful. Why would you do that? You know, like, why in the world would you put out so many products? And the answer, if you really get inside of, it's pretty simple. I have a group of people that, you know, have started on a path, and when they start on that path, like they go do the social content and scheduling stuff for, you know, Facebook posts, right? So they start down that path and what happens invariably when they get on that path is they have other, you know, the people that they're working with say, hey, do you do this? Do you do this? Do you do this? And our clients have done the same stuff. Like, I wouldn't necessarily teach that stuff, but we start getting people at the help desk that are like, hey, how do you do this? And so I monitor my support desk really closely. And when we get a lot of people that are asking for the same stuff, I will do one of two things. Number one, if we're already doing it in my agency, I will decide we're going to do a course on that. And I can get into how we do the course so fast in just a minute because I think that's the most fun part. But number two, if we're not doing it actively, I go find someone else in my group because we have sort of a level system in my group and we have people at the top of that level system that are making lots of money every month. And they sort of add in their own flavor to some of the stuff that we're doing. And so I know I've always got a bed of people that I can go say, hey, what are you doing over here? And could I talk to you about doing a course on this? Because I got all these people asking about it. And, you know, that happened just recently with a great guy by the name of Gary King. That was what we call one of our Black level members. He was making. To be in my group, my Closers Cafe group, you have to be at black level, you have to be making $10,000 or more a month. And Gary, he has this whole system of how he gets clients with the Google Map listings, right? And I wasn't doing that in my agency. So I went to Gary and I said, we should do this. And so we put it together. Now that's the two ways that I do it. I'm either do it at my agency. Somebody asks, we go teach it. And listen, every month somebody's asking, you know, or a bunch of people are asking for different stuff. So we'll go do a course on it or I find someone else. Now, I think what you're probably wanting to know is how in God's name do we actually put the course together that fast?

Exactly.

Okay. So number one, a lot of practice, you know, I've got a staff that has literally been trained to see an idea that could be profitable and can help people and to put it together. So I'm gonna, if it's cool, I'll walk you through the entire process.

Oh, absolutely.

I would love that. Because I wanna swipe it.

Cool. Yes, please do, please do. Cause this is my whole thing with this is I always love, you know, telling anybody about this because it always comes in. If you can put out something fast, you can help more people, period.

Yeah, 100%.

So kind of how we do it is I'll sit down, you know, at. Before a month starts. So, like, typically around the 15th of the month. And I'm saying, okay, what are we doing next month, if anything? And we'll talk to the support desk, we'll talk to everybody that's sort of in our organization, and we'll say, well, people are wanting to know this. And I say, okay, so we're going to do this, like next month, we're going to do this on the 15th, we're going to sell it. So typically what happens is, let's say that we Go live. We typically go live with a little mini product launch to our own people on a Thursday or a Friday, right? And so Thursday or Friday it goes live and we'll start marketing this product typically on a Tuesday.

Okay?

So we'll start an email sequence to sort of get people's heads wrapped around why this might be important in their life or on the other side of this is important too, why they might not need it, you know, why it might not be a fit for them. But we'll start building up and then we'll go live on a Thursday or a Friday, either with a webinar or just straight to a sales page selling the features and the benefits and the sections of a course and of course, why they might want to take it. Now, the cool part about it is these courses are not done when we sell them.

This is something that we've trained our crew and our crew loves. And I'll go through that in a second. Why? But the courses typically are not done when we sell them. So I don't have to sit around and go crazy with, did I do this right? Did I do this video right? Is all this the way that it should be? You know, there's a lot of anxiety that comes with course creation and did you think of everything? And I don't like doing it that way. I like, you know, getting in, selling something during the sales process. If there's something that I forgot to put into the, you know, what should be in the course, somebody will ask me via reply in the email and I can say, oh yeah, we'll add that. And I add it to the sales page as we're going.

When it's all said and done, we typically close down the cart. We open on a Thursday, Friday, we'll typically close it down on a Sunday or a Monday. And then Tuesday I will actually get on and do the course live. So I literally sit down with the PowerPoint. I build out typically five sections of what the course should be and any accessory material, I'll build that into that. And that's all being done typically while the sale. Now, of course, guys, in my head I already have a clue of what this is going to be because we've done it in our agency or we've done it with our online stuff. But actually formulating into a course typically happens over a four or five day period just putting a PowerPoint together. So what we do, we get done and on a Tuesday I'll go live and for about two to three hours I will walk people through the process of how to do the thing that they wanted to know how to do when they bought the course. And the beautiful part about that and why people love that, I think, is because instead of watching something that's stagnant, it's an event, number one. They get to show up and it's live. They get to ask questions. And I don't think I've ever done one of these, and I've done probably 50 to 100 over the last few years. I don't think I've ever done one of these where I got off of that live call and somebody didn't bring something up. That was a question that I didn't really know. I didn't really know beforehand to put into the course because I didn't think it was that important to people. And somebody will say something and I'll say, okay, well, let's just hop out of the presentation and let's go live into an Internet browser and we'll just go do it live.

That's what's so nice about teaching stuff that you're already doing is because it's all up there, you just sort of have to know that. So when I get done with that, I pass it off to somebody on my support staff that cuts it into pieces for a course and then it gets put into a members area and then we can basically sell it forever after that.

That's what is so. Okay. Yeah. So are you selling. Is it discounted to get first access or is it just, hey, just get first access on this live call.

If you've bought from me in the past, you're getting the best price if you show up to the webinar on the pitch webinar or you show up to the sales page, you're going to get the best price if you act early, if you show up live. And even if you don't show up live for the actual training, for all of that, you're getting the best price. And that seems to work really well.

And I love the fact that you're creating the sales message before you actually create the course, because now you basically use that sales message as an outline for the course. You're like, well, here's all the features and benefits I told them they're going to get. Now I know what I have to live up to.

Exactly. And like I said, it works really well. If you've been doing this stuff and you already know how to do it, it doesn't work really well if you're having to come up with it from scratch, which I've not ever had to do, but I can see how somebody could fall into that trap. So be careful about that to anybody listening. But with the stuff that we do, like I said, and with the access to experts that we have, it's not hard to do it at that pace. Now, the first time we did this, I'm just going to be honest, I used to have to stretch this actual teaching portion out over three, four weeks. So I would. I used to, when I first started doing this, and it wasn't just the course was done in advance. I would have to sell it in three weeks of actual teaching. But the more you do it, the more efficient you get with how you teach, obviously. And so with what used to be three weeks of training, you know, two hours, you know, once every three weeks, it turned into, hey, I can do the entire training, typically in one day, two to three hours. And if we screw something up, I always have. Now, I've already taught the stuff once. I've done this two or three times, I've screwed something up. During the actual live stuff, it was good enough. People would have been fine with it, but I wasn't happy myself. I just went back right after I had the PowerPoint done and I recut the PowerPoint just myself. The cool part is I've already had the dry run live. So the second time I do it, it's always better. That's rarely happened in the time that I've had to do it because we have practiced so much with this model. But when it does happen, it's not the end of the world. You just go fix your mistake and stuff's already there.

I love that. Yeah. There's actually two things I want to point out from what you just said. So number one, disclaimer. Don't do this if you don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, please.

I know you just kind of mentioned that, but there's a lot of people that are like, ooh, that's a good idea. Let's go pitch a course on Facebook ads. Oh, shit. Now I better learn Facebook ads so I can teach this course. But that won't go well.

Yeah.

But number two is, I think so many people get hung up on, like the length of the course, thinking that that's a benefit to their customers. Right. So many people think I'm gonna make this an eight week course, because if people think it's eight weeks, that's a value add. Right. But from my experience, that couldn't be farther from the truth. People want to get the knowledge you're trying to convey to them as fast as possible. Like if you were to put out an eight week course and you were to give it to somebody and say, look, it's an eight week course, it's. I'm giving it to you all up front. I bet you if you look at the stats, most people try to rush through that course within a week and not, you know, okay, I'm gonna watch week one on week one, week two on week two.

Right.

We think that like stretching it out is adding value to the customer. But in honesty, the customer just wants to get to the meat of it as quick as possible.

And absolutely. I think this is even snuck into some of the ways that we pitch our products at this point. Is one of the big things that my customers, my core people love is the fact that I can get through an entire training in an hour. Like that's if I can get through an entire training in an hour. They are ecstatic because they know that they can pick up a skill that they will have for the rest of their lives in a very short time investment. And so that's something I've learned too, is that sometimes you gotta make the course shorter because no, I think right now, especially with all the distractions we have, people don't want extra weight, they want skills. And if you can give them the skill, they're going to rock it. And I think a lesson for us sellers out there is the people that have money and the people that are going to be the ones that actually implement what you do and make a lot of money and give you great testimonials are the ones that don't want the big courses. Like if I see something's a big course that's a de incentive for I won't buy that. So.

Yeah, yeah. And I have a question about on how you're spotting these opportunities. I like that you said you're in support often and kind of reviewing things. That's pretty much what we do as well. It's key to have a support person obviously do the majority of the filtering. But what are the things that you're looking out for? So is it like the quantity of times that you see someone say, hey, I want to learn X or is there some other thinking that goes into that?

I think that my greatest skill is not necessarily any marketing skill. It's that I'm a big nerd for this stuff. And so I always sort of have my ear to like, okay, what's the next thing? Is it the next Thing because it's flashy and it's gonna be, you know, fodder for courses, or is it the next thing? Cause it's actually gonna work. And so I'm always kind of paying attention to that on social media and things like that. And so I'm an avid learner and avid reader, just like you guys. Right. And so that's sort of a big part of it. But the other part is, from a social media standpoint, that locks that in. But then when I go to my support desk, my core customers, when I start seeing something pop up, you know, and we don't have, like, the list out there, we don't have a ton of customers. We just have very loyal people. So when I see, you know, five to 10 people asking the same question, our initial thing is, number one, does this go onto a course that we already have? Is this just a video that needs to go into a course? And then I can say, if you're a part of this course, go here, because it's in there now. Or if you're not a part of it, we actually cover it in here. Or is it something that is sort of its own course in itself? And that takes a little bit of practice to feel that out. But typically, on my help desk, within a week or two span, if we're seeing five to 10 people saying the same things and asking the same things, that's when we know maybe we should look a little closer at this.

Makes sense.

No? I love that. Just out of curiosity, have you ever gone and done one of these pitches before the course was made and went well, that wasn't received very well, and then kind of just didn't make the course and refunded the people that bought. Have you ever had that scenario? Because I do think that's one of the benefits of doing it that way is you can gauge will this be successful before you even build the course?

Yeah, I've done a few where it just did not go. And.

There'S a couple weird things about that. Sometimes you're just like, my pitch wasn't great. I didn't explain why they need this. And then sometimes you're like, this was just not a good topic that they were into. It was something that I was into, but maybe two or three other people were into, but it didn't go. And so what's so nice about that is when you're done with that course, yeah, you didn't make the money that you wanted to make, and that stinks. But you always have this little thing that's sitting there that you can add on to another course. And what I found out is what may not be a good they want to pay for it course may be an excellent bonus to something else that really takes people over the top. And so a perfect example, I wrote this course called Headlines and Bullets a little while back that was all about how do you write really good headlines and bullet points? You know, kind of the core of copywriting. And it just did not go well. I mean like, you know, I was like, well, people are not into copywriting right now as much as I thought they would be. So you know, what was that? That kind of stunk. But what, what I found since we put that course out is it has been the perfect accessory to other courses where people were like, oh, this is sort of a missing piece that I wish was there. And now they've got that. So instead of me having to cut a new video in the main course that we sold that did really well, I can just add them to that membership area and it covers that for me.

That's cool.

It's like a, there's no waste.

So even if like a pitch didn't go well, you'd make the course anyway? Pretty much, yeah.

There's been one or two times in the last five years that I just refunded everybody. And you know, I think that that is just a testament to that we're really paying attention to what our people are asking us for, not what we think is going to go well.

Now you mentioned something really fast membership site. So I know a big thing you do is a lot of recurring, it's all about recurring. So what's your pricing like? How does pricing look for all of your offers that are putting out there?

So typically if we do something that is like a one time course that doesn't have any recurring element to it, typically I like to live in the two to five hundred dollar range. And then we've got of course some upper tier things that end up being between the thousand to $1,500 range. So that's sort of the core of that with our recurring. I like to live, you know, right around the 99 to $400 a month range. Now of course that's very much dependent on what it is. But like, you know, we have a mastermind that's Closers Cafe. And you know, you can get in one way by paying a big lump sum up front or you can pay a monthly and that monthly is typically around $200 a month. But like I said, what's so nice about that is when somebody's putting that kind of money in, they're the kind of people that are typically pretty dedicated, and they're the kind of folks that are going to end up being partners later on. And I think that's the most important lesson I've learned there is with recurring in memberships, you really have to bring the heat, Number one, you have to have something that has a ongoing value to it, but you have to build enough money into this stuff that you can provide value on an ongoing basis. And I think that's where a lot of people miss the boat.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I remember you and I, we actually did a little mini training. This is probably five years back or so where I kind of picked your brain about your email continuity program that you were teaching at the time. I thought it was an absolute brilliant thing. Now, are you still doing that, the recurring revenue machine stuff?

I love that stuff. I still do it sort of on my own. I don't teach much of it right now. It works. It works. It's one of those things where if you get the right niche and you're really an expert at something, or you can become an expert at something, people will pay you to be on an email list. And for me, those are the kinds of things that I charge between 20 and 40 bucks a month for, because it's a different sort of thing. But, yeah, it's one of those things that I put out and the people that grabbed onto it, grabbed onto it hard, and they're still doing it to this day. But the people that were sort of had a kind of a foot in it was something that was very hard for them, and that was hard for me. That was one of the ones that I was like, more people should be doing this. This is much easier than what most people are doing.

And really quick, can you give us the summary of what that was? I think I kind of remember from what that was. Sure.

Basically what it was is you go into a niche and you get really familiar with what people are talking about and what they want to know more of. Like, right now, a good example would be cryptocurrency currency. That would be like a primary niche where I would go in. And pretty much once a month, twice a month, you're writing a newsletter. And in that newsletter you give some stuff that is sort of the latest and greatest in the industry. What's going on? What's the underground stuff? What are people saying? And we did a lot of content curation. I just pulled experts in, in that industry and sort of curated the content. And that's what it was all about is how do you go into an industry maybe being really interested in it, but not considered an expert, but curate content from really great experts and put it into a digest that people will pay you 20 to 40 bucks a month for?

Yeah, I love it. And you're basically selling it as like, look, there's a lot of information out there around, for example, cryptocurrency. There's hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of blogs on it. There's tons of podcasts, tons of experts, and if you listen to them all, they'll have, you know, contradicting beliefs about what you should do in crypto. You know, we cut through the clutter, we cut through the noise. You know, twice a month we send you an email and we round up the top 10 must read articles around crypto. And you're basically for a fee, a small fee, you know, somewhere between 10 and $40, like you mentioned, for that small fee, you're essentially curating the best stuff that you could find and helping people cut through the clutter.

I love it.

Right, Exactly.

It's so cool that you could just like go into any niche. If this is the case with an expert, they kind of do all that work. You bring the marketing power however you want to do it there. And yeah, it's just a cool little side income thing. I can see more continuity.

Yeah. And it seems like such an easy add on to anything you're already doing in your existing niche as well.

Right.

You know, it seems like just, you know, you're constantly trying to think of what can I add to my funnel, what upsells, what, what could I add for recurring. That's a real simple one right there.

Yeah. And that's, you know, my whole thing was, how do I feel good about this interest that has nothing to do with my business, you know, and so, like, as I was nerding out and taking all this time to read all this stuff in this business that I had no clue how to make money. And other people were like, oh, that's really cool that you. Where'd you read that? And so that's how that business was sort of born. I was like, well, you can pay and I'll just put it in front of you.

Yeah, I like what you just said there, that whole side. That side passion thing. But I know music is your big thing, right?

Yeah, love it.

So what are you doing there? Because we're both music guys too. You are definitely deeper in than we.

Are before you do. One thing that I've. So Joe and I, we were both musicians. We were in bands through high school and college, and we actually did a little bit of touring. And, you know, we've lived that world a little bit. We've had, like, a teeny, tiny taste for, you know, a minute. But one thing, knowing what I know now about marketing and online marketing and getting eyeballs and directing attention, it seems like now would be such a fun time to be in a band again.

Oh, yeah.

Because I feel like now I've got that skill set to direct attention, and I'm seeing you do this in real life, like, every day on Facebook. You know, you've managed to build this platform, you've managed to direct attention, and now you're leveraging that for your passion. And I just. I love it. So I'm just kind of curious about your thoughts and you speaking into that for a second.

Well, music's interesting because.

It'S really hard to take just regular marketing and put to it, but absolutely all the skills that we have applied to it. Right. And the thing is, the hard part for me is I love all kinds of music, and to pick a path is the tough part for me of, okay, what is this path that I'm going to become known? What's my brand? What's my tiny little niche? Once again, getting back to niching and not trying to, you know, do all the things that you want to do as a musician, but really finding your core thing that when you put out a product, you know, a song, that people are going to get into it. And that's sort of where I'm sort of finding my way right now. But it's fun putting out, you know, cool things. But I think that, yeah, with marketing, that's the thing is once you figure out in one aspect and you learn, hey, I have to niche down. I have to niche down hard and everything, and then I have to market it this way. It really starts to go together. So what I've done, and if you've watched any of the stuff with the goofy little music stuff that I do is I have put down a couple different, what I call test flares. And there's songs that are sort of different styles. All styles that I like that are me, but there are different styles. And what I've basically been doing the last little bit is what am I getting the best response to? What are people gravitating towards that they really like me in that costume. And so doing a few of those over the last little bit, I have a really good sense now of what the market wants more of from me. That's sort of where I'm going now. So this last year, I would say it was kind of the testing phase. Just like what we do with a lot of the niches we go into. I'm trying to figure out what works and then kind of going forward. And I think this applies to businesses too. Going forward the next year, everything that we put out is going to sort of be in that vein. And that, I think is where we start to really see some interesting things happen. And I'm like, you guys, I just think it's fun because of the marketing aspect to it. I love playing music, but I really get excited watching how you can do that even in music.

I love that you're split, testing genres. Yeah, we totally are.

Like, who else is doing? I've never heard of that. It's amazing. No. Yeah. So that's really cool. How much time do you have? Because we have a couple other points we don't want to get.

I have a lunch meeting at 2 that I have to drive to, so I gotta be a little quicker.

Okay.

And if you want me, I'll come back anytime, by the way.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Well, there's one last little rabbit hole we want to go down with you real quick, and that's traffic. I think one of the things that we're starting to get known for and one of the things that we teach the most nowadays is traffic strategy. And you know, anybody that we can bring on that has traffic skills, we like kind of picking their brain a little bit about what they do to drive traffic. So maybe can you touch on like your two or three top traffic methods? And we can. We could dive on those for like four minutes and then we'll go ahead and wrap up.

I will absolutely tell you how I do it. I love. I will build a funnel, right? So we'll build a sales funnel. And like, if you go to Closers Cafe right now and you go to opt in to any of the stuff that is there to opt in on, you will see this funnel that I'm talking about in action. We put it on the blog. The blog is a great traffic driver and it brings in what I would call warmer traffic. But I hate starting with warm traffic. I just hate it. I don't think I really learn anything most of the time from warm traffic. I get a false sense of security with warm traffic. I like starting with just the worst possible traffic that you can find. And So I. And listen, I'm not knocking anybody that does solo ads, so please don't take it as that. But there's this whole solo ad network out there that you can go buy traffic from someone's list, right? And what they do and why I call this traffic crappy in most senses is this. Now, not all solo ad traffic is this way, but in a lot of senses, these are people that got people on their list from solo ad traffic and they're selling solo ad traffic. So all these people that are on these lists, bless their hearts, are just being passed around like crazy and they're just used to that flow. And so when you buy solo traffic for something real and you put them through a funnel, if you can get somebody to buy and to opt in and to buy with that traffic, that's pretty miraculous. So a lot of my funnels start off with very simple solo ad traffic. The best place that I know to buy it, by the way, I buy it from traffic. For me.

I know folks over there, they're really good and they make sure that we're not doing something stupid.

I buy from there and we'll send traffic to a thing and I get a good sense of an opt in rate. We typically, with the funnel that I told you about at Closers Cafe, the opt in rate for that right now, because we worked our butts off on it with cold traffic, is 40 to 45%, which I can take. I will take that all day. And from there, how many of those people are actually buying and buying all the way through the funnel? And so that has been some. That's the start. That's the foundation for me. From there we go to Facebook ads because you can get much warmer traffic, even if they don't know who the heck you are. Even though it's still cold traffic, it's warmer than the solo traffic, right? Not as distracted. Well, that's saying something, but there you go.

Then once we start getting data from the Facebook ad traffic initially, what we do is we take the people that actually went all the way through the funnel and bought and we build lookalike audiences from those folks. And so we start finding more people that way. So that's sort of the three layers past that. What I really love is I love the extra indoctrination stuff. Once you start getting that funnel lined out with those two sources, that's when you get hardcore on the podcast and that's when you put a commercial in front of every podcast that you've done for the last year. For the new thing. Right. And it goes to that funnel. And then from there we're doing YouTube videos, we're doing blog posts, because now we know we've got a funnel that works with very cold traffic. That's when you start warming up traffic with the other ways. And everybody does this stuff different. But that's sort of how I do it.

Oh, I love that.

So that list you just said, like, what was it? Like four things. I think that just teed us up for the next episode that we're doing. That'll be our outline.

I would love to spend an entire hour talking about that because you want to talk about stuff that amazes me. That's it right there.

Oh, we can have a full on discussion about traffic. Because the thing I love about traffic is everybody has slight variations of how they do it and it works for everybody with how they do it. And I just love hearing everybody's stories around traffic and their tactics around traffic and then making my own Frankenstein version from other people's strategies that's uniquely our own. And you know, so traffic, we could probably nerd out for a whole hour episode on that. So I definitely think we should do that. One point I did want to make though, about what you said was even the worst traffic, like the solo ad traffic or even stuff like pop under traffic and really junk traffic can actually be warmed up through the power of retargeting. You can actually.

Because that sort of gets people to show a broad interest. And then through Google display network, through YouTube, retargeting, through Facebook retargeting, you can get in front of that person over and over and over again. Very inexpensive, expensively. And then essentially those people that was. They started as junk traffic, eventually warm up to you and potentially buy so.

Selected to do more.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. These folks are. It's exactly what you said. These folks are so run and gun. And they're used to being distracted very easily. If one message happens to get shown to them more than once, it's a whole different ballgame. You're absolutely right.

So yeah, we'll cut it off here. I know you got to get running. Where can people go check you out? I know you said Closers Cafe quite a bit. Yeah.

Closerscafe.com you can pretty much find anything that you need there. That's sort of where I keep my diary of the stuff that works and the stuff that, you know, actually, you know, of the 50 things that we try, the two that actually work to get turned into blog posts and then Like I said, from there, that leads you to all paths to me, and you can contact me there. And you know, if you have any questions, anybody listening has any questions. I love this stuff. I'd love to talk to you now.

Do you still have Script all and Birdsong and some of those other software products?

Absolutely. That's what's so great is those are still going strong. And what's so great is those are list building for Birdsong and copywriting done for you pretty much with Script All. What's so great is there's not been really any niche we've moved into where those haven't played a very significant role. And so we've continue to improve those from customer feedback over the last two, three years. Just recently we added some new Birdsong updates that completely changed the way that I use the software and made it a whole different use for me. I think that's what's so great. It's like you said, when you find a need for something and you build it, typically that need doesn't go away if you built it for those reasons. Those softwares are absolutely great for us.

Love it.

And we'll make sure to link those in the show notes. There's one question that we forgot to ask real quick. Do you have any book recommendations for our audience that maybe you recommend often or you reread once a year or anything like that?

In the middle of right now, I'm going through several. And one of the ones that I'm going through because I'm really into, I'm writing a couple books right now, which is dumb. Don't write two books at once. But I'm writing a couple books right now. And one of the books that I'm getting into right now is, it's called Perennial Seller.

I've heard about that.

Yeah. And it's from the same guy that wrote, Trust me, I'm lying. And I'm trying to think of a couple of the others.

Yeah, Ryan Holiday.

Ryan Holiday. And Ryan's a great writer, young guy, great writer. But this is basically how to write a book that sells for five to 10 years rather than just being something that's trending. And it's just a really cool concept. So that's the one I'm in the middle of right now. And I'm digging that. And I always tell people, this is one that I read a long time ago and I get a lot of crap for this. But Go Read the Game by Neil Strauss, which is a pickup book. It's a pickup artist book. But I learned so many interesting marketing things from that, and that's one I go back to every two, three years just because it does have some good foundations.

Love it.

And hey, it's just entertaining to. It's super entertaining, let's be honest. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. And let's do a round two. We'll touch base on that. And yeah, appreciate everything, man. And we'll link everything up in the show notes that been mentioned for you guys listening and. Yeah, till next time, dude. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate you guys. It was always fun and this was no exception.

Awesome, man. Thanks.

Thanks, buddy. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things, things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe. Subscribe to our podcast. Just look up hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.