Our Biggest Takeaways From Traffic & Conversion Summit 👥

Welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

With your hosts, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, what is up, everybody? Matt Wolfe here. And we are back with another duet episode, meaning it's just me and Joe. We don't actually have a guest. We're gonna get back into our guest episode starting next week. But this week we've got something really cool for you. So we just attended an event called Trafficking Conversion Summit here in San Diego. And it was. It's pretty much the biggest market in our industry. Sort of everybody converges on San Diego for this one event, and there's sessions going every day in five different rooms, and there's masterminds and networking events, and it's just a big sort of week of intense marketing education and masterminds and networking. And we thought we would share some of our biggest takeaways, and we did exactly that in a Facebook livestream a few weeks ago. We did this big live stream where we talked about all of the biggest takeaways and all the stuff we're looking forward to implementing in our business from traffic and conversion. And we thought that maybe you didn't see that live stream on Facebook, so we'd share that live stream recording with you here on the podcast. So in this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, you're going to hear what was once a live stream on Facebook about all of our biggest takeaways of traffic and conversion, but is now a podcast episode also. So if you hear us mention video or live streaming or anything like that, just keep in mind that this was originally a live stream, but now you get to hear it in audio format in all of its glory. So enjoy this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast where we talk about the biggest takeaways from traffic and conversion Summit. Enjoy.

We always look good, Joe.

I know we do. That is very true. We sound a little hoarse, though.

Yeah. Been about four straight days of talking.

Yeah, I'm kidding. So it's. Yeah. So we just wrapped up. It's Monday now. And it's funny because there's so many people still, probably not partying, but they're still out there doing things. I'm just like, man, I don't have the stamina for this anymore.

We were probably the first ones out yesterday. I was like, ready to go home and go to bed by about 4 o' clock in the afternoon.

Oh, I took a nap definitely at like 6, for like an hour. And I was just in my mind. I'm like, ah, it's just Crazy. Like it wasn't like this in previous years. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. So for those of you who don't know what the heck we're talking about, the two of you, maybe that wouldn't know. Traffic and conversion in San Diego, big marketing conference, biggest one in digital marketing. Happened over this previous weekend and I'm looking at the building downtown San Diego. I can't wait to show you because it would not look good on camera. But yeah, it was cool. So it's kind of like our excuse to. Not excuse, but our opportunity to meet up with all of our friends, new connections and obviously learn a bunch of cool stuff for what's kind of working now in online marketing.

Yeah, yeah, It's a great event because I feel like pretty much everybody in the marketing world all kind of converges on one place at one time, all at the same time. So, you know, everybody kind of compares it to like marketing summer camps everybody gets to see once a year kind of thing. So just happened and luckily they always do it in our own backyard right here in San Diego. So that's always pretty cool. But we thought we'd do a real quick session here where we talk about some of our biggest takeaways. We're actually getting ready to do back to back live streams. We're gonna do two different live streams right now. We're gonna do this live stream where we're kind of talking about some of our biggest takeaways. And then we're gonna do a second live stream immediately following this one just to our evergreen Profits Letter subscribers where we're going to really give some like takeaways and action steps and like stuff that you could go and implement right away. You're gonna get some good takeaways from this as well, but we're gonna go dive a little bit deeper immediately after this call with just our EGP letter subscribers. So this one's gonna be pretty focused on just kind of like the higher level, bigger takeaways from the weekend. So should be pretty cool.

Cool, yeah. And just to remind, if you are a subscriber, if you aren't, now's probably the good time to get in, I would say, because the next issue we're coming out with for the EP letter is basically going to be probably our fattest issue, probably about 30 pages. It's just an estimate, don't hold us to it yet, but it's going to be our biggest takeaways and how we're going to implement these things that we learned over the last like four or five Days.

Yeah. So when we release our EGP letter, our April edition, you know, it's going to be released in, you know, two and a half, three weeks, ish around there. So ideally we'll have a chance to have implemented a lot of it and actually share some case studies from stuff that we've actually tested from the summit. So we're not only going to share all of our notes and our takeaways and that sort of stuff, but we're also going to test some stuff and hopefully have some case studies to share with you by the time that April letter releases. And one thing about that April letter that I wanted to also mention is it's not just the takeaways from sitting in the conference, watching the speakers. You know, we were in special masterminds, we went to all the networking events. We actually put on our own networking event. We were chatting with people all weekend and a bunch of them actually gave us permission to sort of share some of their tips and strategies and stuff that they shared with us in these masterminds and networking events. So, you know, it isn't just the stuff from the conference, you know, there's actually another place where you can go buy conference notes. We're going to share our case studies from the stuff that we tested. We're going to share sort of behind the scenes mastermind sessions and networking and all the big takeaways from that stuff as well. So it's going to be.

It'S going to be the least sort of focused issue we've done but at the same time it's going to be just this mega issue with just a ton of awesome sort of action, step by step tips that you can take away that we learned out of this weekend.

Yeah, no, this is probably the most excited.

Times that we've had in a while because we basically, this last conference we were very focused on not remaking, not trying to do too much, but just little hinges swinging, big doors. So anything that we can basically do to optimize our Facebook ads or Google Ads, there's some cool Facebook messaging bots that we'll be getting into. And that's a big, big topic right now. So automating and kind of starting conversations.

If you are a subscriber. This last issue that went out March was all about owned audiences. So the whole topic was to basically gather as many people as you can in various areas. So these buckets that you have control, you can then communicate wherever you wish. So that could be an email list that's probably the most common. But then you have Facebook groups, Facebook following, Instagram, but now the biggest one, and this actually was not in the last issue, but Facebook messaging. So you can actually create a group of subscribers using things like Facebook messaging paired up with some messaging bot softwares. And that's literally, it becomes a new mailing list. You can have, you know, you have your open rates, your ctr, all these stats that you would be used to and like activecampaign or something.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's really exciting about the chatbot stuff, and there was, there was two or three sessions where they touched on the chatbot stuff. And coming into the conference, we kind of got the list of the schedule and the stuff we were probably most excited to sit in on was the stuff about the Facebook messenger chatbot things, you know, so we were really, really excited to see that. And we will be sort of mapping out a step by step process of how to set them up in our next lab. But we're also going to be testing it and sharing some case studies of us actually testing it out. But the people that we're sharing from ST, we're actually getting 98% open rates and percent click rates. If you have your own email list and you know anything about email marketing, you know, on a high end you might get 20% open rates and 5 or 6% click rate, you know, so these kinds of chat bot, messenger bots getting, you know, almost 100% of the people that open and half of those people that click is pretty freaking insane. So that was pretty exciting.

Now from the event, I feel like there was two sort of big overarching themes. And I don't know if you'll agree with me because we actually haven't totally discussed what I felt like, the overarching. So what Joe and I both did today, we actually came home, we opened up our notebooks. I got a big old fat notebook here of notes from throughout the weekend. And we both opened up our notebooks and started actually typing out our notes into like Evernote. So that was just kind of a way to solidify the notes we took. We're kind of like reliving those moments as we're typing them in. And as I was typing it, I kind of came to this conclusion that there was two big overarching themes of the conference. And the first overarching theme was the whole human to human element, you know, like chatbots and messengers. Those start a conversation. You need to have a lot of human to human interaction. And there's a ton of sessions that that was A big theme, you know, make yourself available through chat. Even if it's, you know, like ol art or that type of stuff, people want to chat with a human very, very quickly as opposed to submitting a message to support, waiting three days, you know, they may have changed their mind to purchase by the time they finally get it back. That sort of thing. People want sort of like instant interaction with another human.

Right.

That was sort of one of the big overarching themes across a lot of stuff that we were, we were, we were seeing there. And then the other one that I felt was a big overarching theme of this, this whole event was the theme of, you know, pick a side, like stand for something. I felt like almost everybody we saw on stage, there was sort of this theme of like taking a stand and, and standing for something in your business. There's a lot of people talking about branding. You know, Perry Belcher talked a lot about, you know, emailing more often. But don't be afraid of people, you know, unsubscribing or whatever because you're emailing too often. You know, just kind of.

You kind of get what. I'm going with this, right, Joe? Well, yeah, kind of get that overarching theme of like, you've got to stand for something.

Well, the big thing, like what you're trying to say, I think is that grabber. So like don't, don't be boring with your marketing basically is like what the. His underlying thing was, was. Yeah, be, be attention getting, do. Be a little controversial, maybe, you know, like push the line. Because if you're caught in the middle, then you kind of get washed away by everyone. But if you're on either one of the sides, then you know, you're gonna have, you're gonna have polarizing statements a little bit, but you're gonna have a hell of a lot bigger.

Exactly, exactly. I think you want to be polarizing in one direction or the other because you're trying to please everybody. You know, you're going to please nobody sort of thing. So there was a lot of stuff being talked about about creating your brand story and, and standing for something and not trying to please everybody and, and that sort of thing. So I really felt like those were the two overarching themes. Is the theme of like creating the quickest human to human element possible in your transactions, but also the theme of like, stand for something. Be a little bit polarizing. Don't be afraid to offend some people to get to the market that you really want. I felt like two Overarching themes. And there was a lot of, like, tactical, here's some stuff you can go do. But I felt like they were. Almost everything was under that sort of umbrella.

I would agree with that. I'm going to say that that's pretty spot on. I haven't thought of it in that way, but yeah, let me. So let me elaborate on, like, I guess a variation of what you said, but I feel like the categories stay the same. Whereas I guess two things that are overarching is the first one being that what exactly what you just said is starting a conversation.

So.

So doing something to trigger that first action that someone. So maybe it's following up with people who abandoned your cart, so they were about to buy your product, but they just didn't follow through for some reason. Like, an option you could do is target those specific people with a retargeting pixel, but run it out on Facebook to a messaging bot that asks like, hey, did you have any questions about the EGP letter? Was there a reason why you didn't buy? You know, and then you basically have. You just start the question and. And you get someone saying, you know, replying. They say that, and then you say, hey, okay, Automated bot says, I'm the EGP bot. I'm here to answer your questions. And, you know, get you. Get you squared up. And then basically conversation starts.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, just imagine the power of that, of like somebody reading your sales letter, clicking over to your checkout page and then clicking away. And then the next time they're on there on Facebook, they see an ad that says, hey, we noticed you were on our checkout page. Do you want to send us a message real quick? We're curious to know, like, what, what stopped you? What, you know, what, why didn't you complete that checkout? They click a button, a messenger pops up, and there's a couple automated messages. But then you jump in and continue that conversation with them and close the sale through bots, through chat. The bot starts the conversation that you actually jump in and chat and finish the conversation.

Totally. So it's cool because you can. Some strategies also is you can start it with automation, like we just said there, and then you can pick it up with a little bit of personal touch. But then you can end it with automation, maybe direct people to a special webinar, an online training or something, or just send them to your support desk. You know, there's a lot of things you can do to enhance the customer experience for people. Yeah, the second thing. So that was Interesting because it's usually using Facebook everyone has on their phone, which is cool. Don't abuse it. Obviously it's such a new technology so you have to kind of. We're still kind of figuring out what best balance is. But another thing that I thought was a big takeaway for me is different creative ways to use email marketing. So Perry Belcher went through his their process digital marketer of basically taking. And I'm not going to go through this whole tactic as this will take a while anyway.

Yeah.

Plus we're kind of standing for our members. Like we're going to line out, you.

Know, as far as like the chatbot and the email stuff. We are going to sort of give. Give our sort of step by step of how we're going to implement it. So you.

But going into what Perry was saying, so Perry Belgrade is one of the owners of digital marketer tnc was the fact that you can take an email promo, say you're promoting whatever it is and you have like a 24 hour window or maybe it's a week long window. But the whole point is let's optimize the heck out of that email with a very, you know, you're going to be testing the headlines, testing the body copy. So you're sending out emails multiple times per day. But at the end of the day the first email you send it to about 10% of the list, you're testing the subject line and then the next email test the body and then so on. So the whole concept is let's optimize these pieces that we can control and squeeze out more revenue.

Yeah, for sure.

That was a biggie. I felt like. So it's basically if we can use email marketing was the other part of it is let's optimize those. But also the second thing was follow ups to people who abandoned your cartoon. Once again, Syed from OptinMonster had a good follow up for people who abandoned his cart for some reason. So again, have a pixelar checkout page. We use ThriveCart. That's just our thing. But he was saying okay, so if someone leaves for some reason you want to try to recover these people while you're fresh in mind. So the idea is try to collect that email address right there on your checkout page. And I think ThriveCart Matt, it collects the email address after 10 seconds or something.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know the exact time that it collects it, but it's something like if somebody starts to fill out your checkout page in ThriveCart and they enter their email and then they browse away. You can actually still collect that email. Send them an email for like an abandoned cart series. So it does that even if they don't, you know, click to submit their email.

Yeah, and this is something that Matt and I have done mainly through Facebook ads. But. But this was kind of a clever way of how. So the whole concept is when they enter their email address and if they don't collect or if they don't actually continue and hit buy and all that stuff, technically what you want is you just created an account for them. Even though technically there's really no account that's made, but you do have their information. So what Syed does from OptinMonster is he has three emails that he sends to immediately. First email, the subject line is pretty much, is everything okay? So we notice. And then in the body you say something short is like, hey, we saw that you were interested or you were starting the process. Just want to make sure that nothing held you up or there was a reason why you didn't finish. Second email is basically saying, hey. And this would come the next day, hey, your account's being held for 24 hours. But after 24 hours you basically say, we're getting rid of your account. So it's a scarcity. Play the second email and again, you know, line out your benefits and whatnot. Email 3, this would be the last email you basically in the subject line says, we're deleting your account. So it's super scarcity. And obviously, you know, the offer is still open. But you're just stating, hey, we're just reminding you, you know, this is a killer deal. Pop up, you know, or benefits and benefits. But it's a creative way of using that option to collect the email address and follow up with people immediately.

Yeah, I like that you actually made a comment on another, you know, Facebook group or a member of about the conference that I wish Ezra Firestone and Syed Balki like together just put on a three day conference because like I would watch every session. They put on like everybody that put on the, you know, everybody that spoke, those were the two that I was like gravitated towards that were talking about some of the best, you know, sort of cutting edge stuff. I really, really like their stuff.

There was, there was a session that I did enjoy on the last day.

That was that the content marketing team behind Digital Marketer had some good ideas. You know, some people might find this kind of basic, but to me it's kind of duh. Why didn't why aren't you doing this kind of stuff? And it was about actually going back through old blog posts and basically refreshing them and updating them and.

Bringing them back towards the top of your blog to kind of breathe new life into them. And they're giving some really good sort of tips and ideas to do that. So I took some really good notes on that session on sort of refreshing and bringing to life old blog posts. And it's funny because we live here in San Diego, so I was driving back and forth to the conference every day. Um, so I was in my car a lot more often than normal. So I was listening to a whole bunch of podcasts on the drive to and from. And to me, it all kind of sort of blended together and mixed together. And I was getting all. All these, like, inputs from podcasts and JV Mastermind events and networking events. And all this was. Kind of. All this input was going on at the same time. But I was listening to another podcast with the guy from Backlinko, his name is Brian Dean, and he was actually talking about.

SEO and getting your blog up to date and refreshing it so it ranks better in SEO. And one of the tips he gave, which I'm going to kind of mix in and talk about in her newsletter this month, because for me, it was all part of the same process, was going through and looking at Google Analytics, looking through all of your blog posts, and you have any blog posts that have, like, no visits in the last 30 days, like, nobody's going to them, just delete them off your blog completely and actually start getting rid of blog posts that nobody paying attention to. Because apparently in the search algorithms, he believes that all these blog posts that are getting, like, no traffic to him are actually hurting your rankings. And so you want to. There's like a dilution effect with more blog posts that don't get a lot of views on it. So anyway, that's gonna be all mixed in together on, like, a little blogging session that we have inside of this upcoming addition.

That's cool. Yeah, that's. That. I did not know that. Yeah, we didn't even talk about that. But there's so many ways. I mean, there's SEO. I mean, anything that you can do to what, take content that you've had before and basically update it, make it a part two or, you know, like an updated version, then you can send an email about that and so on and so forth, you know, so lots of good stuff there. I'm going to take a quick note at.

Or Take a quick look at my notes really fast, see if there's anything.

A big thing. So this is something if you. So something we're going to start doing. And this was first brought to me by Ezra Firestone on one of his podcasts that you shared with me, Matt, but kind of brought back to life is getting testimonials from your subscribers or product buyers. And you could do this very simply using apps Bravo or Boast Boast. IO was one that I looked into and it seemed like it was the better of the two. That's B O A S T. So basically what that allows you to do is it allows you to share, I believe it's a link with your, with your customers or your subscribers and say, hey, download this. You can record a video right through your monitor, right through your computer there, I think your phone even. And then it sends that file back over to the. You know, it'd be to us, for instance. So something that we're going to start doing with our subscribers is to offer some kind of incentive. Maybe it's a gift card for Amazon or maybe one of our products in return for a case study, like a mini case study. So maybe it's a one or two things that someone took away and implemented from our book Evergreen Wisdom or Evergreen Profits Letter or our course. So that's something that obviously having other people sell for you is way more effective than you having to do it for yourself. So something we're going to do is compile a lot of those into not only one massive video, but also we can sprinkle that all throughout the web and use inside of our ads, not.

To mention events like the one we just went to is actually an amazing opportunity to collect testimonial if any of your customers are actually at the event. Joe and I did at the event was we kind of rounded up all the various people that we know, our subscribers of our letter, and while they were all in the same location at the same time, we pulled out our iPhones and got them on the spot, asked him a handful of questions and knocked out some testimonial videos. It'll pop up on our sites and in Facebook ads and stuff like that for sure.

I saw Paul Clifford was just on here and yeah, he got a little. He liked that three step recovery email sequence there. So. Yeah, you're welcome, man. You're at tnc. I didn't see you down there.

No, I don't think he was.

Yeah, we gotta meet up there. And another thing. So this is, this is something if you're looking to get on publications, just random publications like Forbes or entrepreneur.com, huffington Post, all these other things you can kind of use as credibility pieces for your branding. If you apply to YEC Co, I think it's Young Entrepreneurs Council. Council. I was like, what's the C. So if you apply on there, if your business qualifies, basically you get, you get accepted and I think there's a fee as well. But the whole thing is that it gives you the opportunity, a much better opportunity to get featured, you know, kind of quoted on these different publications and then you could use them in your branding on your website. Your.

If you're under 40, if.

Well, that's why, if you qualify. Yeah. So it's, it's like I said. Yeah, you have to have a business size, be under 4 years old. I think you have to be in North America. Yeah. So check it out.

You have to be doing a certain revenue mount to qualify and a few other things.

But, but it's worth checking out. It. There was a lot of, lot of good feedback on that this weekend as well.

Yeah, that was, that was something that I thought was a pretty, you know, I hate to use the term, but ninja little trick. Get some publicity.

Oh yes. What else, Matt?

No, I think we covered quite a bit. We are going to jump over and do a second live stream just to our subscribers here in a minute where we're going to dive in even deeper on some of this stuff.

But yeah, I mean for me again the big takeaways just to sort of recap where to.

Sort of be a little bit polarizing, pick aside, stand for something with your business and stick with it. You know, don't try to please everybody. And then also that human to human element, try to get the human interaction happening as quickly as possible after somebody visits your site or even while they're on your site to increase your chances of sales. Those were kind of the big takeaways. And then the stuff that we're most excited to experiment with in our business is really chatbots and we're really going to dive in on chatbots and.

And.

See how that goes. I mean it's something that I think has a bit of a limited window for how effective it's going to be. You know, one time people were getting, you know, 80% open rates with emails and 50% click through rates with emails. But that was years and years and years ago and marketers ruined it for everybody and now everybody's doing it. So now nobody gets nowhere near those kinds of response rates. Well, I have a feeling messenger bots are going to go in that same direction, so might as well be an early adopter of them and get the most out of them while we can.

Definitely.

I hate to be the marketers that are gonna ruin it, but we're probably gonna be the marketers that are gonna be part of the ruining of it.

Well, this is, that's. I don't believe it has to be ruined. And it should be, obviously it should just be used wisely. And the key is always, you know, don't always stay within the marketing circles. So that's always a lesson of what we. I mean, we learn for ourselves, but apply this stuff elsewhere and be cool, just be human. I think that's always a good rule of thumb. But yeah, like Matt said, it is a very timely tactic and it's one that definitely should experiment with. And the chatbot that was recommended is called minychat M A N Y Chat.

You're giving away all the secrets. I was going to say for our.

Subscribers, but that one's. Come on. That one. Yeah.

Minichat looks really cool. They actually have a free tier so you can actually get in and play with it for free.

Yes.

To do a lot of the automation that you'd really want to do and to get rid of their branding and stuff. It's 10 bucks a month, so it's still kind of like a no brainer tool. But it looks pretty cool.

Cool. And it looks like we had a handful of people commenting and sorry we didn't get to the comments. I've been having to, for some reason zoom to this program. We don't solve your comments and feedback immediately. But Laura, you're on here. Thanks for watching. You said you missed the email sequence. Did we cover it today? I think you meant the three email sequence, the recovery email sequence. I would literally just rewind the video and check it out. I see that Mike Stanger said he's going to be saving this video so you can dive into it later. So yeah, just do what Mike's doing. I'd say. Laura. Yeah, we recapped it there and if you're a member of the EGP Letter subscribers, we are going to hop on right now after this and go in a lot deeper into all these things that we talked about. And obviously our newsletter coming out in April is going to be like a fat issue. It's going to be 30 or so pages outlining this stuff in detail and exactly how we're implementing it and hopefully with results by Then, well, this stuff.

Plus stuff we learned in the Mastermind and networking events and my random podcast I was listening to, to and from the event.

You know it. And Sherry, you're very welcome and thank you for coming out to the overtime event. Yeah, we had. Didn't even say. We had this pretty massive event on Saturday evening at Mission Brewery in San Diego downtown, and probably had a good, I don't know, a hundred people rsvp. But typically it triples.

Yeah. So we had a few hundred people show up that kind of came waves. But it was fun.

Yeah, no, it's super fun. So if you ever find yourself in San Diego and we're doing one of them, get out there because they're worth it.

Do them about once a quarter. Overtimebrew.com I think that's right.

So that's it. I think we're good to go, huh, Matt? Yes, I would say any questions from folks that are on here, but I'd have to probably look about four different pages to see if there's quite.

Yeah, I realized one of the benefits of using BeLive TV over using Zoom is Belive actually gives you a comment stream right inside our chat. Zoom doesn't.

Yeah. So we're learning things. So if you. Or if you have another Facebook Live in software.

Facebook Live ing software.

Can't talk right now. Definitely let us know if you have one that you recommend. We're kind of testing them all right now. It's still pretty early stages, so that is all. I don't see any questions. I've kind of refreshed.

Awesome. Cool. Well, let's wrap it up already.

Thank you. Bye.

Hey, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Now, if you don't know already, myself and my partner, Joe Fear, every single week we put together this killer weekly newsletter that's completely free. If you go to theweeklyprophet.com you can get on this weekly newsletter. And what we do with this newsletter is we scour the Internet. We read every piece of content, listen to blog posts, check out new software and tools, and we distill down the best of the best into a weekly newsletter and deliver it directly to your inbox every single week. So head over to theweeklyprophet.com and make sure you're signed up to receive that weekly newsletter. You're going to love it. Thanks so much again for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We'll see you in the next one.

Sam.