Travis Ketchum — Building A List With Contests and Giveaways

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Joe Fear.

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to another podcast episode of the Hustle and Flow Chart. Podcast. Our intros are horrible. They're all.

You're really bad at that.

Obviously. Podcast and then podcast. But today this is a kind of a unique one. We're hanging out in downtown San Diego during traffic and conversion in a hotel suite right now. We're doing a little film action right now, so.

It's a nice suite, though.

It's a very nice.

Very sweet.

Yeah, it's sweet.

Sweet.

And that. That very radio voice. You have a radio voice too. It's nice.

Thank you.

You should have a podcast.

I am thinking about it.

Are you? It's a little work.

You know, I actually have actually recorded a couple episodes because it'll be going into our new tool, so. Oh, part of our training.

What is that? No, that's not any.

Maybe. Is that something you want to get into or are we not talking about this new tool just yet?

We can get into, like what it is, but it's not ready for people to do anything with it.

Okay, cool. Well, we want to touch on it towards the end.

Okay.

Anyway, let's. Let's intro him.

So this jumped into it. He's already like. He's in their flow, man. Travis Ketchum. He does contest domination and has developed many other apps and software such as WP Lead Magnet.

Some people are a little salty about that one.

I hear that was a very. Yeah, we're waiting till we're warmed up a little bit. You know, we got to bring up the stories and. But no. Yeah. So we're actually at Traffic and Conversion right now and it's really cool. We kind of time this out perfectly. I think we kind of pre planned.

This sort of ish. But we're marketers. Everything's by the seat of our pants.

Hey, man, it's perfect. So, yeah, we're doing this basically at night after the event and wanted to kind of talk about contests because we're selfishly starting to do contests now.

About time.

Yeah, I know, right? No, seriously, it actually is because we've. I don't think we've ever had a strategy. So that's what we're going to talk about here, I think. I think that's a big thing we should talk about.

Obviously you guys have dabbled in it, but you know, you haven't really. Serious strategy implementation.

Failed gracefully, failed forward, I guess we'll.

Call it A lot can Be learned from failure.

Yeah. So I think we're just going to dig into that, but tell us about how. I guess let's talk about those previous software apps and things you've developed because you've been around for a long time developing iterations from WordPress, you know, plugins to where you're at now.

Yeah, I guess all of a sudden it does become a long time, doesn't it?

So, I mean, let's be honest, you got some blog, but I think you're as great as I am.

You know, my wife in the background here, which you can't see, made me get a haircut because my grays were getting too squirrely.

So don't, don't cut that out. Come on. You should distinguish.

The funny thing you like is actually Contest Domination was my first product, but it has evolved in a huge way. So Contest Domination launched in early 2012 as a WordPress only plugin. And it was mainly just out of my own desire to build an email list. And I didn't like any of the other tools out there because all the contests softwares at the time prioritized social in line with email. And I know, and you guys know that the email list is like not even close. Not even the same universe and value for actually generating revenue as everything else. So I wanted to get a simple little plugin designed that prioritized email opt ins and referrals that only earned additional entries. When they got me more opt ins, which was my business objective. It was pretty simple. You know, at the time it was kind of a stress sag. They didn't have a lot of money. Like, you know, put like five grand of it on a credit card. You know, it was like scary times.

Sure.

You know, she was probably freaking out a little bit, but I love it.

When the wives are involved because my wife's the same exact way. It's like, yeah, if you get the permission, you're like, all right, I'm doing.

This Hail Mary time. I was like, I can always get a job at the Apple store. You know, things really get bad. But anyway, so I ran my first campaign and you know, I had spent years kind of blogging through college and whatever else, and I had spent a couple years doing client work, actually doing like ad campaigns, you know, spending 60 grand a month on LinkedIn and stuff. And so I knew how to get this type of thing to work, but it all relied on emails. And when I finally launched my first contest, I generated like 2000 opt ins in a couple weeks. When my prior Sort of side hustle dabbling of blogging and everything with the standard kind of lightbox had only gotten me about 500 opt inside. So to go two years and get 500 opt ins and then go two weeks and get a couple thousand, yeah, that was a real eye opener for me.

What was that first contest? What were you giving away?

So I've learned a lot about the right prizes because the time was actually just an Amazon Kindle. And now I know looking back, wow, what a bad price.

But it kind of worked.

Yeah, it did get 2000 opt ins. You know, luckily the people that were promoting it were in the marketing niche for me to help out. Yeah, to help kind of kickstart it, but so the leads were more qualified than maybe they should have been. But even looking back, it's like, no, no, wrong price even, you know, got emails, but they weren't quite the right emails as much as I wanted.

And the interesting thing is people still aren't using contests properly or really at all.

Yeah, well, they made the same mistake that I did in the beginning. Right. I mean, like I told you guys before we started recording, if you stopped a hundred people on the street and forced them to do a contest that generated results, they would probably pick something like an iPhone, an iPad or a gift card. But the problem is most of the businesses that are running contests aren't selling iPhones, iPads or gift cards. And so if you're, you know, if that's not your vertical, everyone who enters has self selected that they want the thing that you're giving away. Everything that you're giving away isn't directly correlated to what you sell. You're gonna have a hard time selling your thing.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the last time, I've only really ever tried to do a contest once and I think we gave away like a MacBook Pro. I think that was what it was and that was our problem. You know, everybody would share it on social media, Twitter, Facebook, all that, all those places.

And so your endorphins were kicking. You're thinking, great, we're kicking ass. Yeah, we're kicking ass.

We just put 5,000 people on a list with this thing. And you know, we're seeing people's like aunts and uncles who are like, not even in the marketing world opting in for this thing because they want to win the MacBook.

Totally.

And you know, the next thing you know, we're going to mail this list and the response is just like crickets. The list just, just crickets.

If you're Lucky spam complaints.

If you're lucky, spam complaints. And yeah, pretty poor response either way.

Yeah, I always like to remind people it's all about the quality of the list. And you know, you look at contests and they are going to beat just about everything else from a conversion standpoint. Just because the value of your prize can be a lot higher than say a free PDF, right? Because you only have to give it away to one or a few people and you get the referral component which pads your numbers a bit. But even then you still like everything, want to focus on quality. So like an example I like to give is, you know, there was a fitness, like a gym actually in Canada. They wanted to get more gym members. And so, you know, if they gave away an iPad, that might actually attract couch potatoes. Right. And so what they did instead is they gave away some time with a personal trainer. And then what they did is the follow up. They asked some pre qualifying questions. Name, email, phone number. Then they asked, what's your favorite workout? Yoga, cardio, strength training, whatever. And they followed up with every lead and said, hey, you actually have a free five day pass if you want to come activate it within the next two weeks. I see that you like spend class. Our next spend class is on Tuesday. And so even though they only spent a couple hundred bucks on Facebook, got about 421 leads, it was 12 grand in annually recurring revenue. Wow.

It's extremely targeted.

Whereas you're talking about you, you have 5,000 leads and nothing. Right. And you had to pay for a MacBook which was way more expensive. Good point. Than the personal trainer. And so, you know, that was just immediate revenue too. And that was just a couple leads that converted and you still have the list that you can talk to later. And they've all told you, I want a personal trainer. Which means they're motivated and understand they want something to make their life better, give them an outcome, and they've told you exactly what they're interested in. So it's so much more powerful than thousands and thousands and thousands of leads. And we've seen some people totally blow it, right? Like there's even, There was a, there was a tractor company in the state of Washington that actually talked to us first. And I was like, okay, this is a terrible idea. And they gave away a whole super bowl package. It was two tickets to the super bowl, airfare, hotel, time with the, with the players. And then they amped it up and said, not only will you win two tickets, but the person who refers you also gets the same package. I found out that they did the campaign I told them not to do because I saw it in my Facebook feed from someone who has like no money and lives in an apartment. They're not buying a combine, let me tell you. And they have like a quarter million entries. And so it's really frustrating to watch that, you know, because people can do whatever they want to because we are a self service platform. But I just know that if they had done something like, you know, win like a John Deere gator, you know, or like a mower package or anything related to what they actually sell, even if that vanity number would have been 2,000 instead of 250,000, they could have actually followed up.

And I would imagine too their cost would have been lower if they're like actually pulling way lower.

Yeah, because it could have been last year's model. It could have been the demo. Like there's ways.

That's what I mean, like demo, but great shape, you know, whatever. There's just so many opportunities. And then you can always partner with people too, is another great way to kind of lower your cost on that, I guess as well.

So this sounds like a good way for anyone, no matter if you're a newbie in a niche or an expert. I mean, either way, this is a great way to break in and kind of just amp up and create this new list.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the first key is getting that prize right though.

Right.

Because if you get that wrong, like you. Doesn't matter if you do everything else flawlessly. If you get the prize wrong, you're hosed. And then the second aspect is really how do you convert that audience's attention into sales? And so that's kind of the part where people also sort of drop the ball on the winner. Announcement sequence is what we call it.

Now when it comes to the prize, we know it wants to be. We want it to be relevant to the sort of niche they're trying to sell in. Do you have any other, like, tips or advice you give people when picking out the prize other than just make sure it's relevant?

Yeah, I mean, the two other thing about the prize. One is it needs to be good enough to get people excited. You know, no one's going to get excited about a $2 water bottle or something.

Right.

But if you're, if you're considering like something crazy, like you're like, oh, I'm gonna give away a 5,000 or $10,000 thing, you'd actually be better off typically to take that $10,000 value and actually break it apart between like five or five prizes, 10 prizes. Because part of the psychology there is you want people to think when they enter that they have a legitimate chance of winning. And if there's more winners, their odds go up a huge amount.

Right.

There's only one winner. What happens is like, you know, if Joe Blow enters, he's like, ah, you know, I got like 10 friends I could probably get to enter this. There's no way I'm going to be that guy that wins this. Right. They're just going to think like, you know, whatever, I'll leave it to the big wigs to do it.

Yeah.

And maybe you get a couple heavy hitters, but it really discourages a lot of that middle ground. And, and we found that, you know, typically, you know, a small percentage sends you the most referrals. But if you can convince, you know, the 80% of your list that typically only enters themselves to send one more friend, you'll probably triple your leads. And so if you make it attractive to those kind of people and then convince them to just send you one more lead, you can have drastically different outcomes. So that's the other kind of component, breaking it up. If you have big budget. Right. Break it across multiple winners so that.

Give them some hope.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Now with those referrals, is there. Do you have some in. You probably have this built in the tool. But would you recommend some kind of gift for referring someone to the whole contest?

So the way our point system works is by default we select winners on a weighted draw, which would be called a sweepstakes in a lot of places. So if you have one entry, you could technically be the grand prize winner. A true contest is actually most points wins. And we discourage that for the same reason I just said you want to, you know, Joe blue collar to think he has a great opportunity to actually win. And then the referral system, the way that's set up is they by default they get one point for entering themselves. But for each friend that enters through one of their various different mechanisms they have available to get their friends to enter, they get 10 additional entries. So you can. So instead of just saying oh, double your odds, which really gets wiped out because someone else is going to get one entry for entering through your link. Right. You want to give them 10 more entries. So it's like you're going to, you know, more than 10x your opportunity to win this by sending us one more person.

It's a no brainer then.

Exactly. Makes it A lot easier sell.

I love it.

So then what sort of advice do you have once they've got these leads? Because I know there's some sequences that you sort of recommend people do once the contest is going and once the contest is ending and that kind of thing.

Yes, we call that the winner announcement sequence. You know, again, I told you guys beforehand, it's like, I just cringe. People email me like, hey, I emailed my whole list about who the winner was. Like, now what do I do to generate sales? And it kills me just because I know, like, what? Like you have this crazy opportunity that doesn't happen really kind of in any other marketing vehicle that I've seen where you can send an email along the lines of like, and the winner is, you know.

Right.

And then in the body you say something like, you know, we're really excited about our John Deere contest. You know, click here to find out if you won. And so that subject line, it's not uncommon to see north of 50% open rates on your list. And then of those who open, it's like 98, 99% click rates because they want to know did they win? And, and then you send them to a landing page and we actually recommend that the headline says, congratulations, you're a winner. And then you have a video saying, you know, hey, our winners are this person. Our winners are these five people. But we don't want anyone to walk away empty handed. So if you come by John Deregator in the next two weeks, we'll give you a $500 credit towards service or whatever your bonus or discount is because you're making, you know, it has to be irresistible offer, has to be a good offer, but it can also expire. And you have a reason why. It's because they took the time, effort, energy to enter your contest and you have a captive audience. And so, you know, if you get 10,000 people to enter your contest, you might get 5,000 people to that, that page in the first 24 hours after you announce it.

So smart.

And you want to set up goodwill for a future contest. Totally. You want to just leave them, you know, feeling like kind of washed over.

Yeah, exactly. So if you do that cadence and get the prizes right, I think people will be kind of shocked at that. They can get those kind of open rates.

Oh, yeah.

Now, while the contest is actually running, do you recommend they send any emails to sort of encourage the keep pushing kind of stuff?

Yeah, actually we have a put together a calendar, we call it the perfect two week contest. And in that we basically suggest the contest admin emails, the contest list like every two or three days and just says like, hey, as a reminder, you know this contest is going. Don't forget you can get 10 extra entries for every person you refer. Click here to go back to see your total and to refer again. And then we have a built in mechanism that when they get a referral, they get an automatic email that says like, looks like your influence is paying dividends. You just earn 10 more entries. Click here to see your total and share again. That's what keeps that viral loop automatically feeding itself is, is how that works. But every, every couple of days. Yeah, you don't want to beat them over the head every day. Like I get it, I'm in the contest, I'm about to unsubscribe if you don't, you know.

Right.

But if you give them two or three nudges in a couple week period, they're going to appreciate being kept up to date, informed. Especially if you find some other kind of extra freebie or extra training to kind of also do in a psych. Those reminder emails can actually pure profit right on the front end even.

So this is great because we will literally swipe the ideas of pretty much everything you're lining out here because we have some niche sites that. And you're saying open rates, I mean, you know, are you specifying like the 50% open rate, is that like a marketing type niche? Are you seeing that as average overall?

You know, we see them in professional wedding photographers, we see them, you know, all over the place. It's, it's pretty universal. Now of course it has to be, you know, high quality leads, have to start with the right price. Right. Because you don't want a bunch of fake emails or whatever. Yeah, we're pretty good at scrubbing that actually. We do real time validation now. But yeah, it's pretty universal. And actually I would say that the marketing niche specifically actually tips on the lower end of the chart. Sure.

Oh yeah, well that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, because they're inundated. So actually the niche stuff I think has an opportunity to do even better. 100%.

Now let's say this is going to be a very, very selfish question and you'll see in a minute. Let's say, for instance, we had a podcast and we wanted to get a lot more listeners to, to tune into our podcast. Is there a way we can leverage contests to do that? And how would you recommend to do that?

Yeah, so we actually Allow you To use any 3rd party opt in page you'd like as your front end. And so while we don't have a default template for you to use, what you could use is any landing page of your choice for the most part. You guys would probably do it by hand on WordPress because you guys are you guys. But you could use some tools, clickfunnels, optimizepress, whatever.

Yeah, I actually do use clickfunnels quite a bit.

So basically you would just grab some HTML form code, throw it in there, tell us the URL of the page, and then you can design that page. And what I would do is I wouldn't like have a point value, but I would just say, hey, here's the contest we're doing. To enter this contest, subscribe below. Give us the name and email that you used to leave your, that you subscribed with. Maybe you even ask for a comment or something or review. Of course you put the disclaimer only if you've actually listened to it.

Yes, please listen to it.

But yeah, the mechanism at the end of this list of things to do as long as you don't go crazy on it is the actual form submission. And then after submitting, they get the two referral steps and all those referral steps bring all that traffic back to the page explaining what your custom offer is. So basically you're just telling them exactly what you want them to do. And even if 90% of them do what you want them to do, that put in their email, that's a lot more subscribers. Because even though you don't have to track it, that's what I tell people is track things that really, really matter as far as incentives, and try to stop gamification, because that will happen. But you know, don't go into being like, oh, you know, I can't track or give points for likes anymore on Facebook as an example.

That's right.

But we have a section called Sponsor section where we encourage them to like you on Facebook. And people are always like, ah, it's not gonna get any playback there. I'm like, you think it's not gonna get any playback there? We've seen people, you know, with 10,000 people entering a contest, having started by promoting it to their own audience, they're like, yeah, I picked up 4000 likes to my page and it's, it's like the last thing they see on the third page. So it's like you think it's not going to get any play, but sometimes just organically, you know, people are just kind of going through the motions. They're like, cool, I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll do this. And I like it.

You know, not every logically it's step one, step two. Like people want to complete the steps.

Exactly. And we try to not go overboard on the channels available which, which lets them, you know, like my Apple watch. I always want to close the rings. Right? You always want to close that ring. Sure. Finish, you know, finish that objective. And so it really works by keeping it pretty, pretty tightly defined, I guess. I love it.

I mean, this is. It makes it a no brainer for anyone. I'm just thinking of all these because we consult on a lot of businesses. Some are newer and a little greener than the other ones. But either way, I'm like, my God.

Well, it seems to me like a contest is a great way to kickstart a list if you don't have one.

At all, you know, 100%. Yeah, you have a social following, but you could just kind of almost do guerrilla marketing a little bit to kind of initiate.

Totally. And especially if you do it as a lead up to the launch. Because the congratulations, you're a winner could actually be your official launch.

True. With a discount offer or one time offer to buy the product.

Yeah, totally.

Very cool.

Yeah.

Now with. With one of our businesses, you know, one of our partners, Brad, was actually talking to you about it earlier. He was doing this concept of sponsored contests. Can you kind of explain what the sponsored contests are and how that thing works?

Yeah, totally. So we call the contest sponsor method really original.

I know it's a point.

But there's a couple different ways that sponsors can get involved that the end of the day, what you're looking for is lowering your cost of lead acquisition. Right. And so, you know, someone could give you a product for a prize. Right. That's a prize you don't have to buy. They just lowered your cost of lead acquisition because now your total cost of the campaign has gone down. Someone could pay you to promote them on the back end as a sponsor. They say, hey, you know what? I know you get a lot of leads. You're going to be, you know, sending it to your own audience. You're going to be running Facebook ads. Maybe other people are involved. I'll pay you five grand to just like mention, hey, thanks to our sponsors. Check out this cool offer from them. If it's a relevant parallel niche, sometimes they can send you traffic, which is actually my favorite, where you go to them and the Professional wedding photographer is a great example of this. They needed more professional photographers, specifically, in an ideal world, professional wedding photographers. And so they went to like Borrow Lenses and all these other professional people that had their exact customer Persona, but we're not competitors. And they said, hey, we're gonna be giving away a really nice camera. I think that your people from borrow Lenses who pay to rent cameras would like the opportunity to win a very nice camera from us. Have their own. Yeah. And so they went to them and borrow Lenses, said, yeah, that's awesome. Just put our logo on the image, mention us in a couple emails, and thank us on the announcement page.

And they basically just give you. They donate the camera to the contest.

No, in this case, the wedding. The people that for running the contest paid for the camera, but Borrow Lenses sent it to their whole customer list and put it on their Facebook page. So you're getting pre filtered, pre qualified, perfect customer Persona, people entering your contest. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. And they had their Facebook Pixel on there getting seasoned. And after they did this a couple times over and they were getting like 180 to 220,000 people to enter every contest because they would get multiple sponsors. They'd get. They get like three to four sponsors per contest. And then their Pixel became so seasoned that even buying essentially cold traffic, taking off all the filters and letting the Pixel choose, they were paying like 4 cents per lead, not including the padding they were getting from the referrals. Okay. I mean, this is a unique case. This is crazy. This is a unique case. But I mean, they were like, they said, I have screenshots of it. And they're like, we're paying 4 cents per lead and we've added 80,000 leads on this campaign. And as they come through, they're getting a name email, they're saying what kind of photographer they are, whether they're amateur, semi pro, pro, professional wedding.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey, Mikey, man.

Fluid situation here. The sweet, sweet here. No, this is.

Yeah, no, I was going to say with the contest we're doing specifically with our partner Brad, the sponsor is actually giving us the product and saying, this is your giveaway. Go ahead and give it away as the contest. And they agreed to send traffic into the contest. And they're paying us to do that for them.

Yeah, yeah, it's so great.

You know, that's a triple whammy.

You can really mix and match. You know, in this case, good for him. Talk about salesmanship, because convinces them to do all three.

Well, the Second, you get out of that marketing niche, like you just said.

Yeah. Boom.

Now. Now you just open up the door. You kind of use that marketing. Still win. Win for them, though.

Yeah, well. And then the example there is they actually came in with a very different offer at the beginning.

That's true.

And he was able to, you know, use some of the education he had. Obviously, it's like, you know, I think there's a better way that I can give you more value, but you gotta do this for me. And that really changes the conversation. I think it started at $100 for 10,000 visits.

Yeah, exactly.

They're like, you send me 10,000 visits, I'll pay you $100. He's like, how about you pay me three grand, give me the price and traffic.

Yep, that's exactly how it went.

That's pretty much what it went.

And the very next email, they agreed to do it. They said, we just checked with our cfo. He agreed to do it. Sounds good. How do we get started?

Well, part of that is being taken seriously, right? Yeah, because it's, hey, this is what it takes to get results. And they're like, well, if they're charging that much, it must be good, right? So there's a certain aspect of that.

The facade is we look like a blog, but we're like, no, no, no. We know what we're doing here. We know the value and what we're bringing to the table. Yeah.

I mean, we throw out offers at YouTubers and bloggers like that all the time. And we'll throw a floater, see if anything happens. Like, hey, can we put a banner on your site for 100 bucks a month? You know, just assuming they have no idea what their traffic is worth or.

They just don't want to do it anymore sometimes. Sure. In some situations. Like one of the sessions today, they were talking with some of the DM guys, are talking about how they bought a community of essentially survival life people, a community of 240,000 people in the niche that they wanted for 1500 bucks.

Where they go for that?

Yeah, that's a whole different tangent, but.

You got my attention.

They're just talking about how, you know, you can go out and buy your Persona sometimes.

All right, so let's talk about actually getting Traffic into the initial contest. So once you got a contest set up, what sort of. I mean, other than, you know, a sponsor driving traffic to you? Let's go back to our podcast example, because that's a good one. How would you drive Traffic into the contest?

I feel like there's some ulterior motives here.

None. None at all. We have a lot of podcast hosts who listen to this show.

Well, I mean, one of the great parts is that because of the referral mechanisms, you can easily start with the low hanging fruit, just sending it to your own list. Right. Because you can get a nice, you know, 30 plus percent bump often times, which is, which is great. And if you're really nice to your list, hopefully it's more than 30% because they're hopefully raving fans. Right. And hopefully they're all marketers so they can send you the right kind of listeners. Sure. But outside of that, you know, it's kind of the any way you would promote any other kind of offer. Right. I mean, you're gonna have to run ads or you're gonna have to go out and try to find, you know, you know, added to a guest post or something about and then link to the contest offer. But ads are great because contests actually have a start and end time to them and you know, whereas a guest post is more evergreen, often kind of offer type of deal.

But see any restrictions with ads at.

All in contests, sometimes if it's, if it's really aggressive with, you know, please share this, please tag this, which we actually don't encourage and we don't track it will. It will hurt their reach and which in turn kind of hurts their, their relevancy score.

Yeah.

Isn't that a fairly new thing with Facebook where they're, they're kind of. They don't want the engagement bait is what they were calling it. Right?

Yeah. So they don't want you like straight up in your post saying please like tag, share, whatever.

Exactly.

And they've always tried to avoid the spammy stuff in terms of like saying, you know, tagging a friend can't be a condition of entry is the way that that terminology works. They've loosened some of their contest stuff just because everyone was doing it anyway and it was going to be an impossible thing to enforce. But you know, the same rules apply as far as, you know, you're linking your content if you want to be obviously mindful of your thumbnail because you don't want to have too much text on it.

Right.

If you're doing ads. But luckily ads you can put in kind of whatever thumbnail you want. One of the flip sides is if you do put more text in it and people are sharing it, it's organic and so it doesn't get quite the penalty or restrictions of the ad side so that's what you're going for. Yeah, if you want to emphasize the call to action on the actual thumbnail. But then when you do your ads, carefully select thumbnails that don't have quite as much text. That. That's one opportunity. But yeah, that in your. In your own list is really kind of the first places most people start Facebook ads. And in your own email list is a great place to start. But if you really have no audience, no budget, I mean, you really can't beat the one of multiple different ways to work with sponsors.

I love that.

Whether they're basically paying for your traffic, sending you traffic, or some cases both, apparently.

So I mean, hey, it's all on how you structure the deal, you know, Totally. Anything's possible.

Now is, is there a way to do some sort of like evergreen contest that's always running, always working?

I mean, so we've avoided that. We're looking at ways to maybe offer people a way to like rotate through contests. Because just like any offer, you're going to have fatigue and contests while they have these extraordinary results. Right. Like you look at conversion rates like our average, we call our compound conversion rate, which means if you send 100 people to your contest, how many leads do you end up with? Right. Some of those are direct, some of those referral, but how many do you actually end up with to make it a comparable against a standard opt in page and platform wide with tens of millions of entries, our average is just above 59% average. So there's some real stinkers in there. There's some real over performers.

But with that comes the fact that I can't do it all the time. So it's kind of think of it like a big shot in the arm. Right. It's not something you're going to want to run continuously, especially onto your own audience, even if you are creative with new offers, but you're always beating your own audience over the head. They're going to like, all right, I get it. Like, it's a contest. I'm not going to enter a new one every week. But the cadence we suggest people go for is quarterly. And you aim to run the actual contest itself for two to four weeks. And so that way gives you kind of a month for prep, maybe even doing some content marketing ahead of time to get people thinking about maybe a new product you're going to be promoting as a part of that funnel.

Build it up, right.

And then a month to run the contest itself and a month for follow up. Right.

That's Perfect.

Because then if you're like me, which you probably are, you probably have multiple campaigns kind of stacked, and so they may be going through three different funnels over time. And then that gives you enough time to kind of reset the button. I like, in the next quarter.

It's kind of like how you treat your list with a big promotion.

Exactly.

Same idea.

Sort of like a launch in a lot of ways. It's this big thing. There's some hype built in, but it's, you know, they've been doing contests for a very long time. Oh, yeah. Internet marketing launches, that's for sure.

I love it.

I mean, much longer than the Internet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It always fascinates me because you see so many big brands. I mean, you see it on labels of things all the time. But they're just like, like you said that super bowl example. There's hawking all these contests that are unrelated and it just blows us away.

I mean, if you're Coca Cola and it's all about mind share.

Yeah.

That may be a totally different thing. But if you're direct response, like pretty much everyone under, you know, under a couple million dollars a year have to be. Yeah. You have to be like, it's not even an option. And even above that threshold, a lot of us are hooked on that, you know, direct response crack, so to speak.

So it's modeling. The big boys don't do that.

Yeah. I mean, if you're Coke and it's like, you know, pretty much anyone who's going to buy a soda has already decided if they're going to buy soda. It's all about, like, what's the last one that you remember or prefer?

Pretty much.

That's why they buy super bowl ads, you know, that's why they do the big ad campaigns.

Yeah.

No one, no one in their offices of Coca Cola is saying, wow, how many more Cokes did we sell this week because of that super bowl ad? They don't care.

Yeah.

They said, how is our year doing?

Yeah.

Right. It's a much more macro lens and. Sure. So in that case, sure, knock yourself out. But for everyone else, keep it. Keep it.

Well, let's, let's go ahead and shift and actually talk about contest domination in your tool and like the various features and, and functions it does, because I don't even think we're totally aware of all the different types of contests and features that are in it. So I mean, if you want to sort of break it down for us, that'd be cool.

Yeah. So the Block and tackle feature set is pretty straightforward and the sort of thesis behind it has been the same since even the WordPress days. But it's matured in a lot of ways. But essentially our mentality for contest is that there's a three step funnel, right? Three page funnel. So you have the normal squeeze page and then you have an email referral step and you have a social referral step and you can pick, you know, as many winners as you'd like. One of the more advanced features is you can actually do what we call interval winners. So even though we typically go with or suggest that people run shorter contests, like two to four weeks, because you don't want people to forget about the contest that they entered, if you're going to run a longer contest, one way that you can keep them engaged, like if you're going to run like a two month contest, three month contest, maybe it's something really big. You can actually do interval winners where you have your grand prize at the end, but you're picking winners each week, every two weeks, every month. And the way that the interval selection works is it actually looks at people that have earned additional entries during that interval. So like if you had a grand prize with say weekly intervals and I entered the contest and I got, you know, 11 points, you know, one for me and I referred one person, I have 11 points in the grand prize, the final contest and I have 11 points in this week's interval contest. But next week my interval goes back to zero. So I still have 11 at the end. But right now I'm not even in the running for the interval contest. So if you did sort of micro contest within a contest, then you can email your list and say, hey, you know, last week was really fun, you know, we gave away something extra, extra cool. We're doing it again this week, but now it's this cool thing. Make sure you're in the running, just refer one more person, make sure you get some more.

Essentially a way that you could potentially evergreen contest.

It feels a little like that.

Yeah, you could. I mean right now the countdown timer respects the final contest end time, but if you're using a third party opt in page, obviously you have a little bit more control over that. People might be like, why I thought I entered for a weekly contest. Why does it say like 145 days?

That's going to be a while.

Yeah, I mean, so there is more work we could do there. But like I said, we've, we've kind of steered away from the evergreen thing just because we, we think people would be unhappy with the results. And there's still an action you have to take for announcing that, that winner and stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And you're essentially taking away the time scarcity of, you know, if somebody lands on the site and they're like, oh, they just run one every week, come back next week and then they end up obviously never opting in.

Exactly. It's kind of like a webinar, right? Like that there's a reason tricks, there's a reason sometimes people only do them live, you know, or whatever. It's because like you need a reason to do it right now.

Yeah.

And that's part of the beauty of it. So that's kind of like the top level macro overview of it. Obviously subscribes leads to your email list. If using FusionSoft, it'll apply a tag. If you use a list like Mailchimp or AWeber, you can pick a specific list that it goes into. We do a lot of backend work on fraud detection. It's one thing that I think that a lot of people don't realize is such a thing that you need to pay attention to in our world because there's a lot of very creative ways that people have tried to game the system. And so actually every single entry and every single email that people put in the referral step, which is not insignificant, we run through two different paid validation services. We do have our own anti fraud system and then we actually come up with a fraud score. And so if a fraud score is too high, we will ban them automatically and we will actually ban their whole downline. And that can actually happen after initial opt in. So if they come in and they do a couple legit ones like oh good, like, you know, I think I can do this. And then all of a sudden they start pumping in, you know, scripted entries or something. We actually can pick up that on that in real time. Not only block that, block the crap entries that are coming in, but then we can retroactively and automatically like doesn't require human touch. We can undo it by human, of course, but the system can go in and actually backdate and block.

So it'll notice if people are using a little like + trick for Gmail. Right. So if it's like mattplus onemail.com I.

Don'T want to talk about all the ways that we do things, but we look at it, but it will watch.

For that stuff and prevent it.

We look at a lot of factors and we come up with a cumulative fraud Score? You mean the country that you're in that IP address? Some countries just start with a higher score.

They have a reputation.

Yeah. I also have to say if you use Yahoo. Email, you're going to start with a higher score.

Interesting.

Okay, so we just look at trends and stuff and when you get enough data it's, it really paints an interesting picture. And I tell you what, there's some people that will have gone to extreme lengths to try to game our system. I mean spinning up like 45 different like hosting instances to run a script from different IPs in different parts of the world trying to game.

It's crazy.

I want to win that John Deere tractor.

And just some great satisfaction for the contest admins out there though. The best part is when we do ban someone, we let their points keep racking up on their end from their view.

That's cool.

They don't know that they've been detected.

So they keep wondering how that works.

So in some situations, you know, they might be spending, you know, two grand or something on hosting services thinking that they're outsmarting the man, you know, and it's like really? You're like the condos admin might not even know that it happened because you're just, you just don't show up. You're not an option anymore. You're not in the list. You don't show up as a winner selection. You're just gone, buddy. But on your end you see a dashboard where the number keeps going up and you think you're smarter than us. And that's great. You know, you're never going to stop 100% of it. But you know, between the fraud score and a couple other mechanisms we have over many years of testing and the sort of whack a mole, we've made great strides in that regard.

No, it's interesting because the last time I did a contest, I remember there was a whole bunch of fake Twitter accounts that were created and people were sharing it to like their Twitter accounts were sharing the contest that only had like one follower on the Twitter account. And there was like just a whole bunch of Twitter accounts that were doing that and trying to like rack up points through the Twitter accounts. We weren't using contest domination at the time. So I don't know if that's something that.

But that actually illustrates a great point as to why I wanted to sort of level the playing field and say hey, we care about opt ins, which is quality. Right. And so that what you just described is a total non factor now because unless real people are entering through that effort.

Yeah.

It's not producing any extra points. Yeah. And if you are someone that maybe has like a throwaway Twitter account or you have a real Twitter account, you may decide which one I want to share it to. And if you get points for sharing it, regardless of the outcome, you're going to share it to the little egg. Right.

I think that's why I've always been against. Not against, but just kind of like I love the idea of contest, but I just don't know which system or, you know, how exactly.

Well, if the only thing that really matters towards your end score is the opt ins, then quality opt ins. Yeah, the quality opt ins. And I guess that doesn't really matter. Now in the contest is there like various integrations for like share this on Facebook and get one point and that kind of stuff or we don't award.

Purely based on award points for the share.

Okay.

We only reward points for the outcome. And there's of course built in ways to share that. And actually the interesting thing is every single channel, so email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, whatever, they all actually are using dynamic and unique tokens and so on your reporting, you can actually see the conversion rate of just Facebook shares.

Oh, cool.

On the business dashboard. So it's a great way to know like you reach out to support, you're like, hey, this seems low or whatever. And we can actually then gauge that against our whole platform, not just as a holistic, like, how does referral stuff as a whole, but like how does the Facebook channel perform on this specific template? And we can say, hey, this seems a little low on Facebook. Why don't you try a new featured image? Why don't you try tweaking that headline, you know, or like, hey, your email is actually doing great. What'd you do in the copy? Let's take a look. And you know, how can we. Do you mind if we share, like can we use this as training? You know, so it gives us insight for who's who's beating and who's who's not beating the average.

Talk about quickly about the training that you guys give as well. Because you don't just provide the actual tool because that's how we learned about this whole sponsorship, you know, approach our partner, Brad.

Yeah.

He was like, check this out. And then that's where he actually came up with the idea for that deal.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a lot of other tools, they're like, here's a tool, like good luck, you know, and to be honest, that was kind of us in the beginning too. And part of that was because I didn't really feel qualified, like, you know, more of a product manager than a marketer, I guess, in some respects. But now that I have a lot more experience under my own belt and then we've had a lot of customers give us feedback, really get a good holistic idea of what works and what doesn't. And so we've essentially broken it down into three primary trainings. There's the typical execution plan, which is like a fill in the blank, kind of covers some of the things we talked about here on the podcast about like, you know, getting the right prize and how long should it run and kind of some of the block and tackle stuff. The next one is the contest sponsor method that you talked about, which is a, it's a simple little like five module type deal. You know, it's got like a 45 minute long interview with one of actually the camera people talking about how they use sponsors effectively in all, all the different ways and they've, they've tried them all. And then our real premium one is called the ultimate Contest Funnel and that actually, you know, we include the sponsor method with that. But that is like if you basically need hand holding, like if you were to hire me to run your contest, I would basically tell you everything that's in that, you know. So I guess we had a couple hundred hours putting everything together. It's not a couple hundred hours of content, but it's a couple hundred hours of effort to put it all together, including like actual like landing page templates and email swipes. And that's perfect, you know, the contest calendar. And it's like if you were in a situation where you were going to hire someone on your team or whatever to do it, you would give them this login and say, go run a great contest. Now it's obviously designed in parallel with our philosophy on how contests should work, but that's really a hearty thing.

I love it.

We haven't had anyone go through that and tell us that, hey, this was terrible training.

Usually it's, wow, this saved me 30 hours of heartache, or this saved me a 5,000 lead contest that didn't produce any results. Those are the kind of things that we, that we, we were aiming for in our outcomes when we built it.

I love it. Very cool.

Now are there any, any like topics around contests that we didn't touch on that you usually like to talk about? Or do we, do you think we kind of, I Think we covered the.

Two main ones being obviously the prize and the winner selection, or the winner announcement, rather. The one thing I would encourage people to think about, because a lot of times you think, okay, contests are great, but I want to be different. Right. I want. I want a photo contest that people vote on, or I want this kind of contest or a video contest, whatever, and. And there are situations where there's definitely value there. But I would challenge business owners to think about what, like, what is my goal here with the contest and how am I going to be attracting the right kind of leads, just like with the. The. The price selection? Because we look at things like where people vote on images as an example, and we've actually found two things. One is when you ask people to give you content as part of the mechanism for entry, that's a pretty significant barrier to entry.

Oh, yeah.

Much more so than asking for a zip code or, you know, whatever else. And secondly, typically only the people who actually give you the content are the qualified leads. People that register to vote usually aren't very qualified. There are situations where that's not true. But. But much more frequently than not, the people that are coming to vote on something are not qualified. And so, you know, like, for us, we decided that our mission was to help you get qualified leads. And so if that is your mission black and white, then there's a lot of types of contests that in general, you'll steer away from.

That makes sense. Yeah, that's what we're going for. I think everyone's going forward, too, and I know we want to be a.

Good case study for you, so I'm looking forward to it.

Hopefully in like a month or so, we'll have some good results. We can report back.

So we kind of touched on at the very beginning. But you do have another tool that you're working on now. I mean, if you want to sort of tease it a little bit, we can. Yeah, I do that for a minute.

Yeah. So it's a. It's a marketing automation app, and there's a lot coming out recently in the marketing automation space. And we looked at a couple things that, you know, we didn't love about the tools that were available to us. And those things typically came from deliverability and speed of quality campaign production. And so when you look at that, like, how do I get a good campaign up and running as fast as possible? And, you know, we have our own templates and things that we've cloned in the past, but, like, to create that initial stuff was just like it took so much effort, energy and there wasn't any great libraries of campaigns that we could pull from people that were willing to share. Like, hey, here's a great three day sale campaign. You know, because if you went to like an average business owner, we're talking about people outside of the marketing space and you said, hey, you want to run a sale? They might say, great, want to run a three day sale. Okay, how many times should you email your customers? They have no idea, you know, and then, you know, when we look at our own example, we know that like about half of our sales on a three day sale come in like the last six hours. You should probably email a lot on that last day, you know, when that scarcity is peaking. And we think it's right now it's too hard for most business owners to be able to do that. So our tool has a library of proven built in campaigns that business owners can go in and quickly edit and deploy in a matter of minutes because it'll already create all the delay timers, create the tags, literally just edit the copy to match your product.

And these are for email broadcasts.

Email broadcasts, there's some other functionality in there like messengers and sms that all.

Is going to kind of play nice together.

Yeah, play nice together for sure. And then the deliverability side I don't think is going to be as big of a deal to people that are smaller. But as someone who has been using infusionsoft for a lot of years, I think I'm not alone when I say that I. There's a lot to be desired in the deliverability rates and that can be said of a lot of platforms. And the biggest struggle is that you just don't have any transparency into why your deliverability may vary. And if someone else on the platform is a bad actor, that can impact you even though you've done nothing wrong. And that's the part that really doesn't sit well with me. And so we're actually letting you essentially swap out the way your email is delivered the same way as if you took your cell phone and decided, I'm going to try AT&T today, T Mobile tomorrow and Verizon the next day. But I'm going to do them actually all at the same time, which everyone gave me the best reception wins.

Got it.

Don't know why the camera just shut off.

Probably full or something.

Wrap it up. No, it's not full, it just turned off. Oh, well, that's fine.

Yeah. So deliverability, you can use different SMTP providers and that may be over the head for some people that aren't super technical, but essentially you can split test more than just subject lines. You can actually split test how your email is sent. And you have complete control over your reputation because for like 20 bucks a month, on top of whatever art tool ends up costing, you can own your own ip. If you own your ip, then no one else affects it. If someone else is a bad actor, it does not affect your ability to reach your customers and get into the inbox and actually make sales.

And just a horror story. For us, it was more of like a freakout. It was one of our podcasts. It was around cryptocurrency. Just as an example of, like, how this affected us is we just shared. We're like, hey, blockchain. Yeah. And learn some stuff about just basic crypto. Yeah, it's an interview. We weren't selling anything, weren't spamming nothing, teaching crypto.

It was literally us just talking about what it is and why it's going to be important.

And our account completely just. They just turned it off. And we're like, whoa, hold up. And so immediately, you know, got him on the, on the phone there, and they turned it back on, but they're like, oh, yeah, we just had too many other people spamming.

And you understand, you understand how they get there. But you as a business owner, you're like, you just took away my livelihood for a lot of us like that overnight. And you had no say.

Right.

You know, for us, like, a lot of email providers think that their value is in the ability to send email. It's not. The value is in the business logic. And so if you can control the business logic, which is, you know, in the phone example is the iPhone. Sure. And you can just swap out any other provider at the drop of a hat. You know, it's like I'm looking at moving our business finally over to our own tool. And I'm kind of dreading unwinding from infusionsoft. And, you know, that's what everyone has to think about when they switch platforms. Well, what if you don't have to switch platforms? You just switch how it's sent? Because a lot of people move because of deliverability or whatever else. You know, it's often feature set, easy use. Those are all factors. But a lot of times it's deliverability. And if it only takes 30 seconds and some API keys, boom. That's a lot easier than what I'm looking at for.

I think that's a pain point that a Lot of people want to.

Yeah. You still have to get. Make the move, you know, to us to get past that. But then you only have to do it once. Yeah. Is the hope.

I love it. Well, can't wait for that. That's up our alley as well. So. Awesome. I guess what we like to kind of usually wrap up with recommending some kind of book or maybe some, some type of resource, something that you like to go to often something that you'd like to recommend with everyone here.

It could be anything. It could be just totally doesn't even have to be marketing related or whatever.

Oh man, that's a tough one because there's like there's so many good things. No, I'm not. It's not even a stump thing. It's just like there's so many good resources these days. We sort of spoiled by abundance.

You know, it's funny because we, we asked this question on every podcast where it's like, what's, you know, what's one book that you recommend to people a lot? And then we were interviewed on a podcast like last week and somebody asked us that question and Joe and I got stumped and we're like, it's crazy.

I know.

I don't know.

Honestly, I don't always like asking it because it's almost too much. You know, you don't want to bring. But I like to, we like to almost get a whole gamut and see what are the commonalities among, among everybody that we bring in here.

Yeah. At the end, at the end of every year we actually round up all the books that were recommended on the podcast and then sort of order them by how many times they've been mentioned on the podcast.

Yeah. So this might feel like a little bit of a cop out just considering like what ClickFunnels has done recently, but I still am a big fan of like if someone says hey, I want to get into marketing, what do I do of the dot com Secrets book. I still think it's a great book. You know, if you're just kind of getting your feet wet like I can't think of any other resource for the dollar time spent. Oh yeah, I mean, et cetera. That's going to get you more in the ballpark of. Right. Obviously you don't necessarily have to agree with everything or whatever, but there's just so much knowledge dropped on that that it's like, you know, more honestly than a lot of multi thousand dollar courses come out of, you know, a 20 or $100 book.

You can Swipe things right off the pages.

Totally.

It's really cool.

Yeah. So I mean like as far as a go to resource, anyone who hasn't read it was a reason that he sold so many.

Oh yeah, no, he's not leaving anything to, you know, wondering about.

So yeah, totally good stuff.

Cool man.

Good resource. Everybody needs to check out contestdomination.com. is there anywhere else you'd want them to check out? Do you have like a personal website or social media you want people to follow you on or anything?

I love Twitter. I wish more markers. I wish more markers were on Twitter.

I'm with you on that. I actually love Twitter too.

I like it so much more than Facebook.

You're like the only one that's ever. I mean, you've said it.

I say it all the time. But I don't use Twitter as much as I should because my audience isn't on Twitter.

Right.

That's the issue. Maybe that's for the better. I don't know. No, but I do have Twitter. So if anyone wants to follow me there, it's just Ravisketchum. And then if they want some actual contest specific training, they can just go to ultimatecontestfunnel.com cool.

They will put all those in the show notes so they'll be on the webpage.

Well, thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it. This was fun.

Yeah, it was a good time. It's a little different, but it worked. All right, guys, cool. Talk soon.

Bye.

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 I would love for you to 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 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.

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