SMS Can Change Your Business, If You Don't Do THIS! - Amanda Dobson & Joe Polish

So I talked to a lot of people throughout this process and compliance was one of the reasons, the top reasons that people said that they didn't do text message marketing. And it's not that there's necessarily a lot of compliance, it's just that there's a lot of gray area and compliance is different depending on how you acquire a lead. So I'll give you guys just a brief overview of compliance, but I'll preface it by saying this. If you're going to get into SMS marketing and you're doing it because you want to just make money and you're going to be a scammer and you ruin text message marketing for me, I will finally have Neeson, I will hunt you down and I will kill you. So don't ruin it for me. Do it the right way. I'm going to give you the rules so that you can't screw it up.

Acronyms are everywhere in the marketing world today. B2B means business to business. CPC means cost per click. KPI means key performance indicators. SEO means search engine optimization. Most likely you knew all of those. Today we're going to have a new acronym, sms. Hopefully this will become one of your favorites because it ties in so well into your genius network theme this year of health, wealth and elf. It hits the last two words on the target, wealth and elf. And honestly, you'll see all kinds of applications. SMS is the acronym for simple messaging system. This is going to be the theme of this interview that I'm going to do for you guys and gals. Get set to hear lots of amazing, creative and innovative ideas that can help put even more money into your pocket and help you reach even more people with your message and your products and services. The British have a queen. And if SMS was to have a queen, her name would be Amanda Dobson. Amanda is a super smart digital marketer. She's helped some brands go from zero to the top of the industries, top of their industries and specializes in SMS messaging, push notification, chatbots, Facebook groups and many other channels. She leads a rock star team that creates strategies, breakthroughs and drives millions of dollars of sales on a monthly basis. She's going to teach us today how to create new traffic channels and make a lot more money using the simple messaging system. I have a series of questions to ask Amanda and then we're going to open it up for a short bit for Q and A. And to wrap it up after your questions, I'm going to ask Amanda to give us a few closing comments. So now, as in our tradition of genius network events when we have a super special guest speaker. Let's welcome Amanda Dobson with Throw her money in applause.

Okay, I'm okay with the throwing money in.

Awesome. Awesome. So what's cool is me and Amanda have become friends over the last few months. We've known each other, but we never really spent time talking.

Wasn't important enough.

Yeah, well, there's that. But you know, we did an amazing podcast that went up last week on I love marketing with Dean Jackson. So I know from just the time I spent with her what she does. Like this could give you all the capability that would change the way that you do marketing, the way that you interact with your clients. And she totally knows her stuff. So there's some questions I have on this little card thing here, but we can go anywhere we want to go with this. And the big question is, how did you get started in marketing so that people have that context? And then we'll go into this SMS stuff.

Okay. So I actually studied law before I got into marketing. I worked with Fidelity Financial and their secured lending division. And then I moved over to another law firm where I was practicing statutory accident benefits. And I actually ran into a scenario where I had someone actually use one of the lawyers that I was working with used my errors and omissions insurance and was filing paperwork with fsco, which is the Financial Securities Commission of Ontario. I'm Canadian. So you know, for me I just saw this like underbelly of the world of the whole legal community that I didn't want to be a part of. And I had just had two kids at the time, I've got two little girls and I wanted to quieter a life. So I took a low level paying job at a health supplement company back where I grew up. I totally just gave up on that whole corporate world. And it just happened to be by chance. I was working as an assistant and at the time my boss said, hey, I want to learn to write sales copies. Will you just photocopy some of this stuff for me? And as I'm sitting there flipping through the papers, I'm just like, this is hilarious. I absolutely love this. And it ended up being Gary Halbert's sales letters. So I read everything Gary Halbert ever wrote and then I moved on to John Carlton and then I moved on to everything I could get my hands on possibly. And I got my start into marketing literally by doing that. I started digging into the company's marketing and I was like, hey, why don't we test this headline and do this? This this, this and this. And I started writing all of our emails and I went from being the customer service rep to being an assistant to being their director of marketing in seven or eight months. And then from there I met Roland Frazier, Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss. And I was their director of marketing. Got a six figure marketing education just by being thrown into it. So marketing was never in my life plan, it was never something I ever imagined myself doing it. But I found something that just immediately connected with me and it made me so happy and it ended up making me a lot of money in the end. If I had known that before the student debt, that would have been great. But it was totally accidental. But I think I ended up exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Yeah, no, totally, because now you just absolutely, you're not even 30 years old yet, so you're killing it. So how did you come across text messaging? Sms?

Is Roland in the room?

Where's Roland?

So while I was working for Perry, Roland and Ryan, on August 24th of 2017, while Perry was on vacation in the Maldives, he was unhappy with how our email program was working. And we had 7 million people on our email list and we were only mailing a portion of them because they were the actives and all this stuff. So while on vacation, while he's nice and unreachable with very crappy wi fi, he decided to send this broadcast email out to everyone on our subscriber list. So for all of you who have an email list, you're going to know what happened. All of our domains got blacklisted. I could no longer send email. And for an email list of the 7 million size, you can imagine the revenue we were pulling out of that. And if you've ever had a domain blacklisted, there's no end in sight. The process to get it back is totally out of your hands. So we were losing revenue day after day after day because of this stupid mistake. So at the time, and this was totally illegal, so don't do it, I exported all of our customers phone numbers and I started texting them. And the first day I sent a text message, I think I sent it to about 4,000 people. And within two hours I'm texting Perry going like, holy shit, we've already blown our email performance out of the water with this. So I just started digging into it more and more and more. I think we're going to cover some of the results that I've gotten with SMS in a little bit. But that was totally how I fell into this, and this is what I built my career on. I understood immediately that our businesses in this world can no longer be that dependent on a single sales channel. When was the last time Hotmail decided to not inbox you? When was the last time Google changed their policies and changed the way that your email actually gets, whether it goes into promotions or all of this other stuff. So digging into SMS and the other seven channels that I specialize, that's my whole job, is to make sure that you, you guys have an insurance policy for your business. So your revenue is never more than 20% dependent on a single channel. So by diversifying, you're basically bulletproofing your business. So that's, you know, SMS was the key to that.

So why now? Because this is. Well, I'm asking this more for everyone else than myself. I frankly was using voice broadcast as a way to deliver directly to people, people's phones. And then there's laws that. What's that?

So you're just ahead of your time.

Well, I would like to think so, at least tell myself that. But you know, I make a lot of money in relationships and connections doing manual marketing, which is, you know, sending things off to people, audios, videos and things like text. I cannot tell you how many people I have got to start, you know, just sending audio messages to people because of the deliverable. When I have, you know, I can prove that through sms. Even if I'm going to send a message to people via email or call them or whatever, the quickest way I can get a response and the highest level response is through doing that. So all you're talking about is leveraging it on a much bigger scale. We're going to go through legalities, I want to go through compliance. I want to let everyone, I want people here to do it right. I want people here to do it ethically. I want people to not be viewed in any way, shape or form like a scummy, annoying marketer.

If you do it scammy. And then you link this back to me. Remember I studied law first.

Yeah. So why now? Because there's, I mean, obviously the answer is hardly anyone's doing this. So this gives everyone here a competitive and frankly an unfair advantage, if you understand it.

Yeah. And I think text message marketing is going to be a game changer for all of us. And 2019, this is, you know, I said this at the beginning of last year and I said, you know, 2019, 2020 is going to be the shift in marketing. And there's a reason for that, which I'LL get to in a second. But marketing as a whole now is moving more towards conversation. It's no longer, let me just broadcast my message out there and hope it works. We're moving to more conversational, direct response. You know, we're getting back to doing business with people. People don't do business with businesses, they do business with people. So, you know, understanding how to get your message to a person, well, the first thing you have to do is go to where they are. And I don't know if you guys recognize this, but on average, we check our phones 85 times a day or every 17 minutes. If you average that out across 24 hours, it's where we are, it's where we communicate, it's how we hear from our friends, it's how we hear from our family. So, you know, moving towards conversation and moving towards, you know, meeting people where they're at. Text message marketing is kind of at the forefront. And it used to be the case that people did research about products and services on their mobile devices, but then moved over to desktop because they trusted a desktop device more than a mobile device. But in 2018, the holiday season of the end of last year, for the very first time, mobile purchases outranked desktop 51 to 49. So we're now seeing a shift where people are starting to trust mobile devices, whether that be Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon has been a huge factor in that. You know, you log into your Amazon account and it's all secure and you can order whatever you want. We've totally made a shift between making purchases on desktop versus mobile, which is why right now is the best time to get into text message marketing, because people aren't scared to get your message on that device and actually follow through and complete a purchase on the device. There's no friction points, there's no disjointedness from going from one device to another. It's totally seamless.

Awesome. So how did you know that SMS was going to be a key ingredient in business? I mean, so what was your. Other than the success you had with it out of this accidental sort of situation, this unfortunate? And the reason I say this is because you're the only person that I know that's actually put together a full blown training and a course on this, which she sells. And even though we don't pitch here, you should all buy it. Yeah.

So for me, when I'm looking at the results, I don't just look at how much money this brings in, I look at how much value am I Adding to their lives. How can I make things easier for them? How can I get my ideas out to the people who need them when they need them? But just from a strictly results perspective, when I look at my email list and the health of my email list, the metrics that I look at is my earnings per subscriber. So when I send out an email to everyone on my list for every person that subscribed, not person that opens it or clicks it, just the people that are subscribed that I'm sending it to, how much do I earn per email? And for me that was about 30 cents was around there, which was great. And I ran my Q4 stats and I compared it to text message marketing. And text Message marketing was $2.14 Average earnings per subscriber per send. So for me, I understood that my average order values were higher, my conversion rates were higher. Pardon?

Seven times higher.

Yeah. Six times. Yeah, yeah, it was six times higher. And the earnings per click for every person that actually got the message and clicked on it was three to five times higher versus email. Now, I'm never gonna be the person that tells you that email marketing is dead or that you should stop doing email. And the reason for that is when I run email lists, I run. I have 15 million or more people on email lists that I manage and I email twice a day every day. I email content and a promotion every single day. And I don't notice a difference in my unsubscrib. Text message marketing, if you go two or three, is kind of where you want to cap out. You can't send people text messages every day. You just can't because your performance will start to go down and your unsubscribe rates will go a lot down really quickly. With SMS marketing because it's so direct. So it's really important when you're setting up a campaign to keep that kind of stuff in mind. But as far as performance and adding value, like things for example, I work a lot. One of my biggest clients is in the financial space. So for us, a big value add to our product sales is, hey, when you buy this product, we'll give you live stock updates or option like when something changes or we have a recommendation, we'll send it to you in real time versus text message or via text message. So I'm not looking to just make money with text message marketing. It's a really great side effect of it. But I also want to use this to add value to people and make their lives better and easier. I have another client that's in the health and fitness space. And a big part of their revenue comes from selling things like recipe books or things like that. And when we were doing some research, we realized that the audience, for the most part, did their grocery shopping on Sundays. So Sunday morning we're sending out a text message being like, hey, guys, here's the recipes for the week. And by the way, here's a grocery list while you're at the grocery store. So by doing that, we're setting up programs that are sustainable but also giving value and, and making them want to stay. Don't ever set up a SMS marketing program where you're just planning on blasting them with stuff because it's not going to give you any benefit. But if you're giving them a reason to anticipate and actually want your content, you're going to be better off in the end. But just those results for me and just the need to diversify where my sales were coming from was absolutely the moment I decided, this is how I'm going to spend my time. I'm going to just drill and be the best at this.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Well, you know, I actually, I want to come to how to bond with people and any suggestions you have on messaging and how to just nurture a relationship, we'll do that after I ask you some, like, how have you incorporated this into your agency?

Okay, so one of the big parts of my business is obviously the agency side where I handle this for multiple clients, from building their SMS list to actually managing it, monetizing it and providing content. But one of the smartest things that I did in that agency and what I do for the majority of my clients is I'll take an asset like an email list. My agency is called Seven Level Profits, and I'll take their email list and I'll roll the people onto an SMS list and then I'll try and build a messenger bot list and then a Facebook group. So essentially by the end of this, I've got seven different communication channels outside of email that I can contact these people on. So if email ever goes down or a messenger, you know, the messenger bot rules are about to change. In June, where you won't be able to broadcast message anymore without actually paying for it. You know, I'm diversifying my business to protect how all of my clients from that. So SMS being so high performing was how I really started my agency. All of the other stuff was kind of a byproduct, but just being able to do cartaban and stuff where on info products, I'm recovering 20% of average carts for my clients using just SMS. For me, doing that alone justified my value. But incorporating all of those other channels together just creates stability and easy scale.

Yeah, awesome. So how does someone build a list of text message numbers? I mean, people are going to think, okay, so I've got clients, but how do you build it in the same way you would build an email list.

Cool. So I'm a pretty tactical person. I don't like talking about top level strategy. I like talking about tactics that you guys can actually walk away with. So there's two types of ways that you can acquire an SMS lead. One is a keyword, and I'm sure you guys have seen seen this before, where you text a specific word to a phone number or to a short code, which I'll get to in a little bit. And then the other is a web form. So a web form is very similar. Who here has. You guys mostly have websites where you sell products online, right? I think that's the majority of.

Well, no, no, actually I would say Even if it's 50%, that'd be interesting. Ask the question again and let's just ask how many people to raise their hand.

So how many people in this room actually sell products online where you have like an online order form? So starting to build an SMS marketing list using a web form is as simple as this is adding a checkbox onto your order form. And if you do the wording correctly, which I cover in the course and I'd be happy to share with you a couple of examples. I think I talk about this on the podcast as well. If you do the wording right correctly by adding that checkbox that basically says like, hey, I want to get messages from you. You can actually start to acquire all of your buyers onto an SMS list without hoarding your cart conversions. And that was something I spent a lot of time converting. I don't want to hurt my sales by trying to gain this additional sales channel, but it's a really great way you're doing it anyway, so you might as well just add the freaking checkbox. You can do this really great if you've got, does anyone in here have a Facebook page or a Facebook group? Raise your hand. So you can actually just put a Facebook cover photo with a contest with a keyword. So Survival Life for the longest time was one of my biggest clients. You can't advertise weapons on Facebook, but they can't do anything about an interest category on a page or a group. So I regularly did knife giveaways on our Facebook cover photos and it's just organic traffic to me. But to monetize that on the back end with SMS was a game changer for us. We ended up we took our blog from zero to $80,000 a month on Survival Life just by adding an SMS opt in at the top of the page. So under the logo on the blog there's just a little checkbox where you can opt in with sms. It's still there right now if you want, want to look at it. But looking at these existing traffic sources and basically saying, how can I get just another piece of contact information?

I love how you just say that thing. It's like, yeah, we just added this, just add a little snow, little checkbox and we went from zero to 80,000amonth and then we're off to the next.

It's really big impact stuff. But I just want to preface this by saying when you're adding a checkbox or when you're adding SMS consent to anything, you can't assume that email and like. So let me just put my thought together on a form. When someone's submitting their phone number to you, you can't just have them put their email phone number at a button where they submit because that's not technically giving you permission. They have to give you, you have to give them the option to subscribe to just email, just SMS or both. So that's the point of the checkbox. So if they don't check that checkbox, it's not technically consent. You have to give them the option to separate that. So that's just like a little tip that I learned the hard way.

Did you go to prison? Is that the hard way? Was that what you mean?

You know what, I don't think I would fare well in prison. So no, I avoided that one. But I talked to the experts on this. I'm really lucky to be friends with some of the CEOs of top performing SMS platform. So when I was going through the course I was like, hey you can, can you guys just go through this and tell me if anything's wrong? What am I doing wrong? So we just perfected it and kind of made it so that it was more like I knew what was coming down the pipeline for SMS marketing. So I made it to kind of suit that. But in the podcast as well, I could go for five hours on how you can actually implement and get SMS names. But listen to the podcast that Joe posted because I go pretty in depth on different placements for opt ins and different messages you can send out to your email list to get SMS leads.

Yeah. And I literally just posted that episode a couple days ago on the Genius network member site. You can find it just by typing in Amanda Dobson, Joe Polish, Dean Jackson, whatever. It'll.

Dean Jackson bought a little bit of value.

He did.

We carried it. But he was the pretty face.

That's true. It's a good way to describe it. The thing we were talking about, even like nine word emails and the way that you, you engage with someone on a nine word email is also a way you can do the same things and in many cases get better results by doing it through SMS than if you're doing it through other channels too. So it's a great way to take your already existing marketing and make it.

This is very much bolt on.

Yeah, exactly. Bolt on.

I'm working on a cool product right now that actually is called the seven word sales letter.

Seven word sales.

Seven word sales letter.

You had to beat the. It's like seven minute abs. Now you gotta do six minute abs, right?

Yep.

That's great. That's great. So let's talk about compliance then, because that's important to me and I also am very much about not being. Not using marketing methods to be a jerk and to get yourself in legal trouble.

Yeah, well, we're in a room of jerks, so we kind of got to be careful.

Exactly. That's why I want to really intrigue. Yeah, that's why I want to go deep there.

So I talked to a lot of people throughout this process and compliance was one of the reasons, the top reasons that people said that they didn't do text message marketing. And it's not that there's necessarily a lot of compliance, it's just that there's a lot of gray area and compliance is different depending on how you acquire a lead. So I'll give you guys just a brief overview of compliance, but I'll preface it by saying this. If you're going to get into SMS marketing and you're doing it because you want to just make money and you're going to be a scammer and you Ruin text message marketing for me. I will find Liam Neeson, I will hunt you down and I will kill you. So don't ruin it for me. Do it the right way. I'm going to give you the rules so that you can't screw it up. There are two types of compliance rules that you really need to know. The first is for a keyword opt in. Now, a keyword opt in does not perform as well as someone submitting their phone number on a field on the Internet for you, but it has better retention, and I'll explain that in just a second. So when someone sends in a text message to your phone number, they're subscribed to your list immediately. Now, carriers really like that type of opt in for a couple of reasons, and the number one reason is that you're initiating the contact. So the liability for them is really, really low. And the alternative can be pretty freaky. So they really like that kind of opt in. So you need to send them a couple pieces of information, I think I remember off the top of my head. But if not, it's in the podcast. So you need to send them your business name or the program name. What are they subscribing to? You need to tell them how many times a month you're going to be messaging them. You need to tell them frequency. So I recommend 14 messages a month as being your frequency because I like to send two text messages a month and then give myself a little bit of playroom in case I want to test. To test something.

You mean two a week?

Pardon? Two a week. Yeah, yeah. And I say two a week because I find I like to mix in content with my promotion. So what I'll do is I'll send a piece of content on the Tuesday that outlines a problem, and then I'll send them the promotion on Thursday. That solves the solution or the problem that I outlined for them earlier on the week. But you have to get. It's like an email list. You have to give them a mix of promo and content, or they're just going to unsubscribe if you're just blasting them with stuff. So you need to give them the program name. You need to tell them how many messages you're going to be sending them a month. You need to give them the links to your terms and conditions, and then you need to give them instructions on how they can opt out. So just unsubscribe at any time. And that's kind of the compliance that you send just at once. If they opt in with a keyword. And the flip side of that, the other compliance piece is the web form. So imagine Joe and I are dating and we have a really bad breakup. So I take Joe's phone number and I go to every scammy website there is and I subscribe his phone number to every text message service that I can find. I can find some really shady stuff out there though.

That's a good idea.

I can subscribe you to. Yeah, I just ruined a lot of relationships. So the phone carriers didn't like that. So they want you to confirm the subscription. So they want to make sure that the person on the other end of the phone is the person who actually wanted to be subscribed to that. So when someone enters their phone number to be compliant, there's no compliance police out there that are going to get you in trouble for this, but there are regulatory bodies that are watching. So you're not going to go to jail or anything. But Jiffy Lube I think was charged like $40,000 per offense for not doing this for everyone that complained in a class action lawsuit. So the stakes can be pretty high, but there will eventually. They're working on tightening up on this stuff. So just do it right from the beginning. So when someone texts you from a web or enters their phone number into a web form, they have to confirm the subscription. So your first message to them needs to be it's, you know, so and so from blank company. Confirm your subscription below by just replying with a Y. You cannot message them anything else at all until they reply with the Y. Once they reply with the Y, they're technically subscribed to your list. And then you just send them the same message you would have sent with the keyword that has the frequency, links to terms and conditions. Unsubscribe information in that message and then it's free game. You can text them all day, every day if you want to. I don't recommend, but that's the minimum requirements for compliance. And if you're going to go above and beyond and you're not going to follow the compliance rules, it's like everything else, crazy attracts crazy. So you're going to have annoying subscribers and you're going to have just not a sustainable business if you don't follow the compliance stuff. It sounds like a pain, but it actually ends up working better for you in the end because the people that are on your list are there with intention. They want to be there. They've confirmed it. Like what I said earlier, the key keyword has Better retention because the web form has to go through that additional step of getting that confirmation for the subscription. So that's kind of the overview of compliance.

Well, and honestly, I've always thought that just doing good relationship marketing and bonding and delivering something that people want that's helpful, that's useful, that's insightful, that's engaging, does not come across as is someone constantly trying to pitch them something. And if you're just pitching people, you can, you know, which, like the reason people get annoyed by telemarketers as an example, and the whole industry, which isn't a bad thing. It's not a bad industry. It's just the way it's been used is most people receive calls that are someone just. It's not like they're calling up to be like super helpful. And by the way, we happen to, you know, it's been. Consumers now view it as offensive, annoying people. And you can treat.

It's their lives. You're evasive.

Exactly. So it's. Any marketing method could get to that point, depending on the use of it. I probably should have talked to you about this beforehand because Genius Network members are really capable of buying stuff, using stuff, implementing stuff. I never had this conversation with you related to platforms. Like, what kind of platforms are out there? Who do you recommend? Who do you use that we could go to here? And the reason I said I should have talked to you about it is maybe you can introduce me to some of these companies or just set it up so that everyone here can get a discount or something and I can get affiliate fees for it.

Damn it. Yeah, well, I can actually already do that, so we'll talk about it a little bit after. So you can share it into the group. But I can get you guys access to some free credits and definitely discounted services. And I guess I could give you.

Oh, no. And here's the thing too. Let me say this too, because I don't. If we actually do something like this, I don't even know if you do affiliate. I should have talked to you about this too. Any sort of thing, I would like to set it up. I don't want a penny from anyone here. I'll give the money to Genius Recovery Foundation.

Well, I was going to say we've talked about this before. Any affiliate stuff goes directly to the foundation.

Yeah, I want to do that to all that. I don't want this to be like, oh, let me pitch people here on something so that I can make additional. I mean, they all pay me 25 grand. I'm grateful for all of you as clients. So anything that will enable them if we. Yeah. So who do you recommend?

So first of all, there's a lot of things you need to consider when you're choosing an SMS platform and it depends a lot on your intention for your SMS program. So if you know what you want it to be when you start, start out, it's a lot easier to choose a platform. So right now there's three types of platforms. One of them isn't quite up and running yet, but will be very shortly. So the first is a 10 digit toll free number and this is really easy to get started with. So this would be a company like Call or sorry, Sales Message or Scipio. And Scipio was actually the text message platform that I got started with. It's $199 a month and you get unlimited text messaging. It's got a 5,000 person contact limit, but if you're savvy like me, you just add 5,000 and then delete them. And then add 5,000 and delete them. I'm savvy. So those types of platforms are really great. They don't quite have the same deliverability as the second type, which I'll cover in a second. But if you're just getting started in text message marketing, it's a cheap, really good, effective way. It allows you to have two way conversations. So if someone replies to you, you can reply back to them and have a conversation.

What is your name again?

Scipio is.

That's Randy Garn, one of the best.

Humans in the world.

Yeah, super nice guy.

And then the other one is Sales Message which is owned by Chris Bresson, who's also an awesome guy. He helped me a lot with the course. A lot. So those two are really great platforms and you can immediately get started with those. So essentially you sign up for a platform, you choose your 10 digit phone number and you're off to the races. The other type of platform is a short code platform. So have you ever gotten a text message from a five or six digit number and just be like, what the heck is this? That's a short code. So essentially you apply for a short code and those short codes are run through all of the phone carriers and they're pre approved to do broadcast messaging so you get better deliverability. The text messages actually fire faster and get to your consumers better because with a 10 digit phone number it can take up to 3 seconds per message to send. I was sending a webinar reminder for a client when I was first starting out and I didn't realize that they had such a big list and like people were getting the message like seven hours later. So it was like two o' clock in the morning. I got some really angry replies. So untended your phone number, just keep that in mind. It takes a little bit of time for those text messages to actually leave the system. But with the short code you get really good deliverability. They're pre approved by the carriers for broadcast messaging. The cons are that you can't do two way messaging, especially if you've got a shared short code. There's a shared short code and it's. And then you can also do a dedicated short code. So a dedicated short code is something you rent or buy on a monthly basis to actually maintain that number. And then people are only getting text messages from you. Most platforms have shared short codes. So I could be sending text messages from the short code, Joe could be sending text messages from this short code. It's not the most ideal situation but you get really good deliverability. It's cheap and you can do it at scale. And most of these platforms, whether it be a 10 digit toll free number or short code, you can automate this stuff. So it's the same as email. You can automate drip campaigns or broadcast stuff. You can do a lot of stuff with both of those. And then recently because there's limited inventory of the short codes and they were running into so many issues with the shared short codes because some people were spamming them and then deliverability was dropping. So what's coming down the pipeline now is 10 digit long codes. So it's going to be a 10 digit phone number that's dedicated to you but has all the benefits of a short code. So that's kind of like something that I included when I put the course together that's not really rolled out yet, but it will be. So now you guys know that. So like you're going to be ahead of the game because they're actually going to be eliminating short codes eventually altogether and moving to the 10 digit long codes.

Yeah, and you know, I know from just my own experience of how things are delivered to me, the emphasis I place on receiving things directly texted to me versus emailed or any other format is infinitely greater. And when we send things, when I send things, it's more effectively. I mean, I think this is the highest ROI in terms of touching base that many of you could even do well.

On average it takes someone 48 hours to open and react to an email. With text message marketing, you open and reply to something within six minutes, generally speaking. So six minutes is the response time. So for those of you who have an email list, if you do a lot of subject line testing, I actually test my subject lines via text message instead of email. So I basically use the subject line with a call to action and I'll test it on text message list because in an hour I can have way more data than I would on testing via email. And before I forget, I didn't mention any of the shortcode companies that I've used before. So. So a couple that I'll recommend is Call Loop is a good one, Slicktext is another one, SMS Edge is another one. And then those are the three main ones that I'm using.

And by the way, what I'll do if we could get, we'll send everyone a follow up with links to all of these things and it's on the.

Podcast episode page too. There's some suggested ones there as well.

Yeah, exactly. And so if there's anything that you can connect us up with with these, I mean I'd love to even have whatever be it trials or something for people to test this. Eunice or Chrissy, could one of you guys grab me one of my marketing books and then we'll do some Q and A here for a few minutes. I want to show an example because I've been doing this for years. I mean I started this is why.

I fangirled Joe for years.

Yeah. Thank you. So you know, this is a free recorded message. And when I was a carpet cleaner I was using free recorded messages because the Internet didn't exist. And so my thinking was how can you say more without having to pay for more space? Because I look at all forms of advertising as real estate. If you're going to pay for a newspaper ad, if you're going to pay for a Valpak coupon, a yellow page ad which are offline vehicles that, that tv, radio, whatever, or you're going to have a website as an example or social media, wherever you're going to put a message. It's real estate. So the copy that you use what you say. So I learned that you could literally say more without having to pay for more space. That's when I started teaching service businesses how to use free recorded messages and get little in column ads versus half page phone book ads. Because that, I mean one of my very first clients was a guy named Don delew back in 1992, 1993. He still has his company, Healthy Home Carpet care. And he was running half page phone book ads. And I sold him a script to a 24 hour free recorded message for $250, even though I paid a copywriter $1,800 to write my first consumer guide. Then I paid the copywriter another two $250 to turn my consumer guide into a free recorded message script. And I took him from a half page phone book ad in the Denver phone book down to an ad smaller than a business card, an in calm ad that said warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this re recorded message. Call anytime, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Learn seven questions, ask a carpet cleaner before you invite him into your home and how to avoid four carpet cleaning rip offs and off that $250 a month ad. So I charge him $250 for the script. The ad ended up costing $250 a month. He quadrupled the response he was getting compared to a half page name, rank, serial number ad, which is what everyone pretty much ran. And he brought in $62,000 in revenue in a year. And that's when I decided I got to package this stuff up and sell.

It to other carpet cleaners there.

Yeah, yeah. Now that was using a. And what's funny is it works so well that throughout in the late 90s, every major city in the United States had one or multiple versions of my free recorded message ads running in chiropractors. Like I've seen it a million times everywhere. Yeah, So I had literally millions of consumers listen to free recorded messages that I would teach these businesses to use because I'd license my stuff to home remodelers, heating, air conditioning, printing, painting floors, jewelers, hair and nail salons, pest control, all these different industries. But what dawned on me is that the phone is such an important thing. And so today I even have carpet cleaners that I get them to put free recorded messages on their vans because no one's going to pop out a computer and go to a website while they're driving, but they have their phone and they'll call. Now here's how this SMS ties in because I know I'm talking about some old school stuff, so bring it to modern day. So here's, you know, I was using free recorded messages. So the way I would sell carpet cleaners is I would run ads in industry trade magazines and it would say, you know, how to, how to double your business in six months or less, how to get a flood of new customers, you Know, the money's not in carpet cleaning, it's in marketing carpet cleaning services. And that discovery changed my life. And I had a direct response ad with copy. And then at the very end, the call to action with call to request this free report. Because no one wants to call and request a free sales letter. They want to call and request a free report. Now, the free reports were educational, but they would pitch, they had something I was selling, which is a course. And they would call in and they would listen to a free recorded message and then they would leave their name and physical address because there was no email when I first started. There was no Internet. I had my first website in 1996, but I started doing this stuff in 1992. And so what would happen is I would literally sell them using free recorded messages. And once they became clients of mine, I would teach them how to do the same thing. And what would happen is, well, I don't know if this would work for my clients. And then I would say, you bought this thing using this. You are a recipient and a user of this method of marketing. So once I would say that, they're like, oh, it was like some appeal epiphany where it's like, oh, I bought this way. So obviously people buy this way, right? So I started putting free recorded messages, even on the course when I would send them the course. So I would use the free recorded message to capture the lead. I would send the free report, they would buy the course. Then when the course arrived, I had a free recorded message and they would and it said, warning, before you open up this package, call and listen to this message from me. And they'd say, hi, this is Joe Polish. What you're holding in your hands is the most powerful course ever created for building and growing your carpet cleaning business. This is also a marketing technique that I'm going to teach you in the course on how to actually. So I would literally enroll them into this thing. So I started putting stickers on, you know, on physical sort of things. You need to stop that. That's so hurtful of you to do that, Tony. Thank you. So here's the pre release copy of this book. You know, this book was written two years ago, but I'm again, people are like, what century are you going to release this book? I've been working on a very big campaign. That's the reason I haven't released it yet, which will hopefully be huge. So I have warning. Reading this book will change your business. Call now to hear an important free recorded message from Joe at 1-800-Now, the beauty of this, when this comes out, this message will describe to them the value they're going to get in this book. I will also have augmented reality book built in. If there was an app called Live Portrait you pointed here, it would actually start playing a video of my bio just because of this picture. So every chapter in the book, once it comes out, and it will probably be published by Hay House because they want to publish the book and give me controls to do whatever this crazy campaign I want to do with it. But every chapter will have videos and stuff. But the thing is, right from the COVID of the book, even if it's the electronic version of it, I will capture their phone number and I will put them into an SMS system, which Amanda doesn't know to what degree I'm going to lean on her to help me design this whole thing. But it's going to be. Yeah. So the book becomes a seed. And so all of the things that you are putting out physically from business cards or whatever are an opportunity for you to capture and start engaging with people and training them how to use it. And if you are in the business that actually helps your clients, if they have clients that educate other people, if your coaches, if you, if you're authors, if you're in financial services, you actually can make you texting them, you can frame it and actually deliver it as a value add to being.

You should always deliver that.

Right, Right. The point I'm trying to make is like, don't view this conversation with Amanda as just another way to pitch people. View it as a way to deepen the engagement with people. Because once I had. You'll get everyone's phone number. If they call and listen to a free recorded message, you can say, oh, and by the way, if you'd like to receive, you know, the three a week emails that I send out, how many of you read those? Yeah, those are literally going to be built into an smsa. Would you like to get these via text? Because I know a lot of people. How many of you would actually like that to receive those via text? Right. It'd be kind of cool. But the thing is, it would be great. And a lot of you that aren't reading them, I can guarantee you, if I start started sending them to you three times a week via text and you opted in to do this, you would actually read them at a much deeper level. And so the point is you're already using content. I mean, every one of you is putting information out into the world. You're doing it already. So this is another channel and another form of engagement. So let's do some Q and A. Is there any tips or anything that we should talk about before we go into this? Because.

Yeah, so I can give you guys. I know monetization is going to be a big part of this for a lot of you. So just a couple of things that I've learned over time. So what I've learned is the first and third Thursdays of the month generally are paydays for the US So that's when I sell high ticket stuff is the first and third Thursdays of the month and then the second and fourth Thursday of the month are generally lower dollar ticket stuff for this and I mentioned it a little bit earlier, but when I'm sending content, because you do need to send content, use your content to put pre frame your offer, highlight the problem and then give them the solution later on. Send time is also really important to remember for text message marketing, especially if you're going across time zones, which the majority of you will be before and after work are really great times. Saturdays are also really great times. Who in here has a Facebook group? Any of you guys have a private Facebook group? So if you go into your private Facebook group, you can actually go into member insights and it'll tell you what days of the week and what times of the day people are most active in the Facebook group. And knowing that the majority of users on Facebook are a large portion mobile, that tells you what days of the week and what times of the day to actually send text messages because they have their phone in their hand and they're interacting. And if you've ever done email send time optimization, leverage the information you already have to launch this successfully from the beginning. So those are just a couple of things that I've with come up picked up over time. I know we cover a lot of this in the podcast as well, but those will put you at the front of the pack.

Great. Okay, so let's do some questions. Jim, you mentioned Don. I remember the day there when he cut your pony table off. Yeah, yeah. The guy that was my first client that I sold that to, we also in 2000 or whenever that was, we auctioned off, we sold tickets, raffle tickets for $25 a pop. And whoever got pulled would actually be able to cut my ponytail off. And so we auctioned off the right to cut off my ponytail. And we sold $5,250 worth of raffle tickets in one of my seminars because they really wanted to chop off my ponytail. And we gave the money to leukemia, lymphona. And the very first guy, Don Delew, also was the guy that they pulled the ticket. And I had thousands of clients at that point, but we had, I don't know, a few hundred people at that seminar. But it was hysterical and weird and that's how it ended up being him. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Anyway, that had nothing to do with the.

Yes, I would've tried to sell the ponytail back to you just for nostalgia. You can keep this.

You want? We're. You know what? Sorry, I'll take 30 more seconds to waste your time with this story. Yeah, it was supposed to go to locks of love, but we found it a few years later in an envelope. And we still have the ponytail. Yeah, it's kind of weird, but now with, you know, maybe in the future the hair things that will regenerate another one of me in the.

That just sounds like someone was trying to frame you for a crime.

Yeah.

Sprinkle your hair at a crime scene.

That's actually tells you what kind of person I am. I should probably get rid of that ponytail. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's funny. Anyone who hasn't, I highly recommend the podcast that Amanda just did with these guys on. I love marketing. It's really great. More of the same, but some other tips that are really valuable. The 10 digit long code, is that going to allow two way communication or not?

Yeah. Yeah. Because the reason they can't do it now is if you message back to a shared short code, it doesn't know where to send the message because it's coming from lots of places. But with the 10 digit long code, it's dedicated to you, so when people reply, you'll get the replies. When you talk about best time to send out text messages and you mentioned Thursdays and. And paydays and Saturdays and stuff like that. Is that dependent on whether your business.

Is B2B or B2C?

Because I found real differences between weekends and stuff like that for B2B. Any different take on it? B2B. I would avoid Mondays and Fridays. Fridays, I don't know for you guys, but Fridays for me are always weird sales days because I feel like people are already mentally checked out of their business. And Mondays people are dealing with the backlog from the weekends. So I would look between the Tuesday and Thursday stretch for B2B and then B2C. I gave you my tips before. Yeah.

Shockingly, we found a really good open.

And response rate Sunday night. And it Might just be my tribe. But I'm wondering if that's email, that's not text. So I was just wondering if you did anything like that. Text.

Yeah.

I'm not a religious person and when I was first starting it with text message marketing, I started sent a text on the Sunday morning, not thinking about it and it was like my phone went off in church. What were you thinking? I was just like, oh God. But Sunday nights are great depending on the messaging. But Sunday, when you're looking at, when you're setting this kind of campaign where it's a device that's in someone's hands, you've got to take their lifestyle into consideration. So Sundays are very much leisure time. People are wanting to distract themselves from the fact that Monday is coming. So depending on the type of content that you're sending, you'd probably get a pretty good response. I just avoid Sundays because like, to me, like Sundays, people's like, let's not think about life. Got it. And I'm not always looking at this from like a monetary perspective, but yeah, I would imagine Sundays would be, you know, pretty good depending on your market.

Super resistance. Wait till certain religious groups start exploiting this as a fundraising opportunity.

Oh, I can't wait. Sometimes I like just worry about the demon I'm just releasing on the world.

All right, good catch.

So I kind of have two questions. Does it really depend on the product.

You'Re trying to sell and whether SMS.

Is a good platform? Not necessarily, because I think you can pretty much sell anything through conversation. And when I first got into text message marketing, I assumed that this wouldn't work for high ticket offers. And I actually had a client who sells an $8,000 coaching program and she had been running this offer for so long and it just kind of stopped working via email. So we tested it via text message and I think the first time she sent it she made like, I think it was like 30, $38,000 selling or $40,000 the first time she sold it via text message. And this was a dead offer. She wasn't making any money with it at all. So it definitely works for high ticket as well as low dollar offers. But like, can you give me some like more context? Because this works for products and services, it works for retail, it works for physical goods, it works for coaching. Well, so most of my clients are B2B.

I work with universities and hospitals and things like that. So they don't necessarily have cell phones.

It's the office line.

So I don't know how I would Even apply that or if it's even.

Applicable to something I sell in something like that, you'd probably want to go with something more like a, like ringless voicemail or like something like that Joe talked about a little bit earlier. Because they may not have a cell phone, but they're going to have a work phone line. But yeah, in that scenario, text message marketing may not be quite as effective.

Well, here's what I would say though. Most your world is print, right?

Keyword.

I licensed my course years ago to the printing industry. And so there's a guy who sold 1200 copies of a rewritten version of my carpet cleaning course for printers. And so I was doing carpet cleaning audits and he started doing printing audits. And one of the things you realize is that people that want to hire a printer now back in the day, this much different world today, you know, all businesses were getting letterhead and flyers and brochures and business cards and stuff. And a lot of them, they didn't like that sort of business because it's one offs and it's not a lot of margins and they're, you know, personally, you know, it's like a lot of service. But I said start charging printers to go in and do a printing audit where you'll charge them a fee and you'll evaluate everything that they're spending money on with printing and give them advice on how different ways that they can reformat, different ways they can get stuff done. Why are they getting it printed? People don't want to print shit. They want the results of what they're getting printed. They want more business. Right. So I would say go in and be a provider of advice and tell them how to get the best stuff they need in the right way. Get it printed properly, teach them things, educate them, charge them 250 bucks, 500,000 bucks, you come up with a consulting fee. And then if they end up doing business with you, they can apply that towards any printing order that they have. And it would switch the positioning so that they're no longer a salesperson trying to sell and printing, but you're an advisor trying to help them think through what they're getting stuff printed for in the first place. And so the term we would use is as a printer, you are printing money legally. Because if any problem in the world can be solved at the right sales letter, if you're printing something for somebody that's actually going to make them money, you're printing money legally, right? So start using like so what you said earlier, people don't do business with a company. They do a business with a human, an individual that happens to work in a company. So every one of the people that is ultimately part of the pipeline that's interacting with you doing business, they all have cell phones and these are people that you can engage with. So I would print on the stuff that you put out for your own company ways that they can listen to free recorded messages, ways they can opt in and get text messages, but do value added things that will help them because a lot of them would rather engage with you that way. And there are ways to capture phone numbers from everybody if you hit them with the right offer.

On average, I think I read the stats on, on Slicktext or one of the sites, I credit it in the course. But 44% of people would rather do business with a company that they can text or do like Messenger Bot, like someone they don't have to talk to directly. And I think we're more and more moving in that cause I don't know about you, but I hate dealing with support or anything like that. I would rather deal with it via text message because I don't like confrontation. And if I have a problem, if we ever get in an argument, I would never call you to argue, text you. I can text fire, but I could never say it, but I think people are more.

You would test a fist in a poop?

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe some flames.

Exactly.

But we're more and more moving that way where we don't want to deal with confrontation. And that was actually part of the ways that I grew our SMS list. So if you messaged into our support, I would text you, would get an email back that said like, hey, someone's working on your request. They'll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours. But if you want an immediate response, just, just text us and we'll have someone text back immediately. And we moved like, I think it ended up being like 62% of all of our support over to text message.

Well, I mean you take Nick Janicki's company Tru Rest with the float pods, right? So I went and floated yesterday and then I spent a little bit of time talking with Nick afterwards because he happened to be down at the Tempe location. And so they're. So scheduling is done through text. So if I wanted to schedule, I sent a text message saying what appointments are available. And this was yesterday. In the morning I was like, man, I could really float today. I have a genius network meeting the next day. It's, you know, so I sent a text and then the text came back 2:30, 7:30 or 8:30. And I'm like, I'll take the 2:30 appointment all through text. And it's, you know, it's like. And it's not even a real human. It's kind of like a sort of an AI system. But I'll tell you, like, this is where if you guys want to see a slick system go. And as a Genius network, you'll have to enter your credit card just in order to get in the system and open with Truist. But as a Genius network member, everyone here can in Tempe can float for free. If you want to just do a free float, I work that out with them. Right. So if you want to sit in a float pod, but just to see the service and be like, oh my God. Because a lot of people be like, I want to do this in my own company. But it's text messaging. And so it's SMS marketing.

Even if you do, if anyone in here does webinars. Webinar show ups are like 40% higher if you send text message reminders versus email reminders.

Yeah. Think about it. You do a great post on Facebook and you would like people to read it. I just posted something great on my Facebook page. You have a podcast. I just released my new podcast. You know, listen to, to it here. You know, I mean, whatever, whatever you're doing.

I just started testing something really funny actually. So I noticed for one of my clients they had a webinar where the drop off was really steep. So instead of just accepting the drop off, like we didn't have the resources at the time to refilm the whole thing. So instead what I started doing was texting real time updates. It's like, hey guys, if you missed this, Joe just revealed his top 10 secrets to doing this, this and this. Here's the link if you want to jump back on the webinar. So we are actually seeing the webinar rates go like this because people were jumping off and then coming back on, jumping off and then coming back on.

That's great.

But there's a lot of other applications. Like I do a lot of list rentals with my email lists and sometimes I have a list rental that does terrible and it affects my deliverability for my email program for the rest of the week. So to fix that, I'll send a text saying, hey guys, I just sent you a really important email. Go check it right now. Or whatever the value prop is but go check your email right now. And I get a spike of opens which impacts positively my email deliverability for the rest of the the week. So you can really start to look at SMS and all of these other sales channels that I mentioned before as leveraging one to benefit the other. It really becomes a domino effect.

I love it. We'll do a couple more questions and then we'll have. And by the way, we're going to do dinner for everyone here at six o'. Clock. Okay. So if you need to run the restroom, just go to the restroom and do quietly because I'm not going to take a break. We'll wrap up at the 5 o'. Clock. So I think. And then you guys will have time to network and we'll have a great dinner tonight with everyone. But I do want to spend a few more minutes doing some Q and.

A. Yeah, I don't have a question, but I want to share something that we do. And this is really pertinent to those of you who in your business, your customer has to wait on you. We have an auto repair business and people will drop their vehicle off in the morning and we have a shuttle that will give them a ride back home or to work. And then the rest of the day they're wondering what's going on with their car. Is the estimate ready? What's wrong with their car? Has the technician received the parts yet? Is their car ready yet? And so as they're going through the process, as their vehicle is going through the process, we'll send them a text message update. And what this has done, what it does is it reduces the number of times the customer calls us and interrupts our customer service representatives or our service advisors just to answer the question, what's the status of my vehicle? It reduces the client frustration and it reduces the number of phone calls that we get that are not marketing phone calls that are just the client wondering what's going on. So it's something that can really help to give better customer service for one. And just by giving a simple text.

Message, that's really fantastic. And for those of you guys selling physical products, you can absolutely automate product delivery notifications as well. So it's like, hey, your product's going to be or your shipment's going to be delivered today. Here's the tracking number if you want to watch it. People love that stuff.

Yeah. Let's give Tony a mic. And before I forget, I want you to actually tell people how to get your course and whatever sort of special thing you want to do. Could you share the process you used to develop your course? What did you do? Who helped you? How did you decide to do that?

I didn't really decide to do it. I just had so many people ask me about it that I was just kind of like, all right, like, I'm just gonna put all the information together.

No, honestly, she was speaking about it and teaching people because he was actually.

The one that was like, okay, seriously?

Yeah, no, I saw. She literally. So Alona and Amber, many of you know, rented my space because we have rented this room to Genius network members to use it to do courses. And so they were doing a training here and Amanda was, you know, speaking at it and like, you know, I've watched her and I've listened to her and she just, I'm like, wow, she just really knows her stuff. So in a lot of ways you just identified that. First off, people don't know how to. They don't know what you know. You can make money doing this. I mean, this is a great opportunity. Package this stuff up and train people how to do it. And that's, you know, I mean, part of it is when a lot of people are, you know, that they will give you money for training. It's a lot easier to have motivation to put together a course than just say, hey, let's put together a course.

It was actually this was the first time I've ever. I've done this for tons of clients. I've sold millions of dollars of courses, but I've never created my own before. So for me, this was totally like. It is so much different when you do it for yourself to you guys. Because I didn't realize even writing copy as myself to sell the course was so weird because I'm so used to writing as somebody else. So when I wrote it as me, it was the most surreal experience. But what I did is I actually took on a couple of clients to do just text message marketing. And I actually created the course as I went through the steps of setting up their SMS program so that I could actually create SOPs and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. And in the course you get copy and pasted text message campaigns so you don't have to write them. I wrote them for you. You get a lot of stuff that kind of just makes the process a lot easier. And I just put it together as I was going through it myself. I just used my own SOPs and the information that I had. And then I called in Randy and Chris and a couple of other SMS platforms and had them go through it, put their staff through it, promote it to their list, to make sure that the information I was putting out was the best and that the concepts were going to work across every business, not just my business. And they kind of went through that and they shared with me the policies that were coming down the pipe because there was a lot of things, I don't have the access to the carriers that they do. So they were like, this is what's going to happen with the 10 digit long code. I would have never known that otherwise. So they came in, they critiqued it for me, and then they wanted to take part in sponsoring it by giving free access to the platforms and stuff through the course. So it was a really fun process and I learned a lot in the process and I unintentionally got quite a few clients from it.

Well, let me ask you this then because usually the opposite of. Is you sell the benefits of the course and what it will do for someone. Not the. When you're selling travel, you don't sell the travel, you sell the destination. Right. Because no one wants to hear about the labor pains of hopping on airplanes and lines and shitty food and all the pain in the ass stuff and missed flights. You sell the destination. However, I'm going to do the opposite of that. What are the features? Not the benefits, but the features, like how much? What is the time commitment that someone will have to. First off, what do you sell it for then? What's the time commitment that everyone here that wants to take this on realistically, either themselves or for a team member? Because a lot of people here would rather just give a course to a team member and have them learn stuff. Although I think you don't delegate.

I built it knowing that was the case.

Yeah. So what is the realistic sort of effort that someone's going to have to put into this in order to install this capability into their company?

Yeah. So I sell the course for 500, I think 497. The course I think is only three or four hours long. It's pretty condensed and I included a lot of stuff in it. I don't just cover text message marketing in it. It's obviously the main factor of it.

And by the way, when she said, because you just released this, you just completed this thing. So this is like.

Yeah, I haven't actually even done a full scale launch of this yet. And I appreciate your feedback on it as well. So if you do go through it and if you're.

Yeah, I'm waiting to go through it.

If you feel like there's something missing, let me know. But I built this for people like me who are excited by the results of their hard work. For me, I'm that button refresher. I don't mind going through the work as long as I'm immediately gratified by the results. So I built the course knowing that. So it's really easy to go through, it's pretty easy to implement. It's more the strategy and the psychology behind when and how and what to say in the text messages. That's the most important part of the course because the tech implementation really isn't that hard. With systems like Zapier and stuff like that, it's not that hard to eat integrate SMS marketing into your business. It's just knowing how, what and why that really is important in the course. But knowing that we're busy and we have a lot of stuff on our plate and I can't tell you how many clients I've had, that's like we've been meaning to do this for years, but we just didn't have the time. I included things like checklists and the copy and paste campaign so that you can hand this off to someone else and there's virtually no way to screw it up. Like it's totally QC proof. This is everything you need to do do. But knowing that you're sending an offer from a mobile device, it only makes sense to have a mobile optimized offer. So the course also covers mobile optimization and things like how to minimize page load time and some of the little more technical stuff that you'd want to hand off to someone on your tech team or something like that. But mobile optimization for me, outside of text message marketing has been the biggest needle mover for me in all of my businesses, my clients businesses, businesses bar none. So the mobile optimization part of the course is probably one of the most valuable sections in IT and something everyone can benefit from. And that was something that I did during the course creation process. I actually went through all of my clients sites and did video walkthroughs of all of their sites being like, ouch, we should be doing this, this, this, this and this. So I created the mobile optimization checklist which is in the course. So it shows you what to be looking for, when to be looking for it, and what to do do about it. So those are the kinds of things that kind of come with the course that aren't directly related to text message marketing but will give you a better result in the end.

Yeah, it's funny I sit and think about Tony's question. Even though I've been putting together courses since 1994, I don't really often think about it being difficult to put together a course, although every course I've ever put together has been difficult. But it's like the first time in years I've ever thought like, wow, that's probably like a really, really big obstacle because if you sit and think about a course, and of course he's a cpa, so that says a lot. Right. But the thing is, yeah, it's probably like. Seems like an insurmountable, difficult sort of thing to do. And in real.

Yeah, it was terrifying. Let me tell you what you're doing.

When you're servicing clients, because you actually have to think about it.

Made me think about all the stuff.

You actually have to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. All of us know what we do and why we do it when we do it, but sometimes 12 hours later, we don't exactly remember that as so doing it the way you did it is very smart and it's very approachable. Yeah, look, there's two ways to actually think about course creation too. One thing I've often told people is to go to the draw shop and get a whiteboard video. And some people hate whiteboard videos. Right, whatever. What I've told people, though, is like, if you go through the process of creating one, it's similar to Dimitri hiring Dimitri to take you through their. What's it called? The thing I just went through.

Yeah, Essence extraction, expression and execution.

Yeah, so what? Grab a mic too. But getting Patrick on the phone with me, having him do my origin story, what ends up happening is when you're going to create something, you have to go through the thinking, like one of the biggest jobs that a great copywriter has to do, that they never get really any acknowledgement and respect for is people are expecting them to write a sales letter or just produce some sort of webinar or some sort of campaign that's the deliverable that you're going to get. But they have to do. Do a lot of research in order for you to write copy or design and marketing. But you have to learn about all this stuff. What doing course creation allows you to do is learn about you and learn about your clients. When you wrote your book on SEO, it's not just what you have in terms of a big book, it's what it does for you. The fastest way to accelerate your learning is to teach it to other People, people. I mean, there's a big reason I do Genius Network. I mean, think about this as a business, right? I bring very smart people together. I charge a fee for it. It's not a cheap fee, it's a high fee. It attracts players with money. It's positioned in a certain way. I basically crowdsource knowledge and have other, you know, what are 10 minute talks. It's not me up there teaching the stuff. I'm back here learning because I'm curating and I'm bringing some of the smartest people together and doing something that collectively they won't go and self organize on their own. So if someone tried to organize the people that are in Genius Network on their own, it would cost them way more time, effort and money than $25,000 a year. So it's a value from that level for people that appreciate it. But it's also an incredible thing for the enhancement of my own knowledge. And if I have to literally teach something or facilitate something, think of what that does to my education. I mean, I'm sitting here bringing Amanda here because I have not yet gone through her course. I have not yet launched this. This forces me into doing what she's talking about at a much deeper level. Because now that I've made this like, this thing, if I don't start doing this in my own company, I'm going to look like a hypocrite. But the fact is I'm doing it to a little degree. I mean, the biggest aha was in 2012 when I first was first. First time we ever actually let people come to like Genius Network meetings that were not Genius Network members. When I started doing the annual events, the first one I actually did was in 2010 in LA. It was just Genius Network members. Then we did it in 2011 and I have Paul Zane Pilzer and a couple of other people in New York. And then 2012, I'm like, let's offer this to. It was this literally like 15 or 20 people that paid 10 grand. We didn't market it. It was like word of mouth. Well, you're not Genius Network, but if you want to come to this thing, 10 grand. And I sent a text to my buddy Jim Warman, who I've known since literally right out of high school. And I said, hey, I'm doing this event in New York with this person that's going to be here. It's 10,000 a person. You know, do you have any interest in this thing? And I had not spoken to this guy in over A year. I just decided I'm going to send him a text message, but I've known him forever, and he says, he's like, wow, that sounds, like, amazing. I'd like to go and I'd like to bring my partner. He's like, is that 20 grand? And I remember reading that text. I'm like, holy shit. I just made $20,000 by sending a text message. And that's when it dawned on me. Like, you know, time flies. We forget how quickly. If you go back to 2012, most people weren't doing marketing like that. They're just talking to each other. It was a communication mechanism. But right at that moment, I was like, oh, my God, like, this is a vehicle. And I started talking about that.

It's a little bit of slow execution. We're in 2019. You're just getting to it.

Yeah, well, but here's the thing. We still do. We do text messaging. I collect when I speak. I do do this, but nowhere near the left. No, but you should insult me as much as you can, because shaming me will perhaps make me do more.

I was sure that we could just turn this into a roast session. Just between. This is what we do.

Well, let's talk about all the dumb shit that I'm not doing currently that you can help me with.

We don't have that much time.

So is there any more questions that someone has for Amanda? Because I want all of you to at least feel equipped to be able to do this, and I'd like you to tell people how to get your course. And I want to preface this because I even said to her, we don't pitch at Genius Network. And I don't want everyone to say, hey, now, this is something where I would like everyone that wants to do this to actually do it. If you listen to the podcast, if you just go to some of the websites that we can send out, you don't need a course in order to start doing this. You can do it. The course will just assist with it. I don't want anyone to get this, though, and not be happy. So if anyone buys this course and it does not fit you or whatever, will you give them their money back?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, good.

Anybody? Not just Genius Network members.

I just don't want anyone. I just, like. I'm very sensitive about trying to pitch stuff to people that are in a 24 year old.

I'm, like, shocked we didn't talk about this.

I know it could have been more strategic and way more intelligent. That's a lesson in and of itself is get, you know, kind of figure that out beforehand.

And with a Facebook group as well. I'd like, I want it to be a community around all of these communication channels, not just like, let me just teach you how to do it. So the course comes with a private Facebook group. And that sounds really cheesy, but I've got, you know, Clayton Makepeace, who's the world's highest paid copywriter in there. I've got.

Who introduced you to Clayton?

This guy Perry Belcher, who's one of the best copywriters in the world and one of the most strategic businessmen that I've ever known, is also in that group. I've got Chris and Randy who own SMS platforms. I've got Jeff Usner, who's the king of push notifications. I've got experts in bot stuff. So it's not just like the Facebook group isn't just about SMS marketing and like me showing examples and stats and stuff like that. I have experts and the top of their game people in this group. So you can ask questions about pretty much anything and get a pretty solid answer in the Facebook group, which is awesome. So it's worth it, honestly. If you buy the course for $500 and you can't recoup the $500 in a single text message, then just tell me you just have your money back.

What I would like is I want to actually get genius network members. Not only everyone here, but I want to introduce everyone to doing this and I want to see how other people are using it. And I want this to be an ongoing conversation of here's how we're doing it. Because the more that, you know, like, if we can get Howard Getzen as an example to start actually utilizing this and then he can come up here and teach people marketing, that would be a win. That would be a total win.

I was on a. I did a webinar yesterday for a group of Amazon and I thought about it. I was like, holy crap, I don't know how to implement SMS to Amazon because you don't retain the information. So we brainstormed for like an hour on how you can implement SMS marketing to Amazon. So it's just like, this is only going to get bigger and better and more widespread as we go.

Not that Jeff Bezos needs any more ways to infiltrate people the way they've done, but if they started putting free recorded messages or text here to get this one thing on all of the boxes that they ship out every day, and all those boxes actually Gave an ability to capture one more mechanism where people could do permission marketing. It would be a massive game changer. I got Evan Pagan to start putting. He used to do interviews with dating experts, which was another idea that I gave him years ago, which he tries not to give me credit for. Put free recorded messages on his product packaging for Double youe Dating. And then his doubleyourdating.com for David D'. Angelo. And then he also had catch himandkeephim.com with Christian Carter. I think it was for women. So he had online dating advice for men, online dating advice for women. Not online, but dating advice for men. Dating advice. Added a million dollars a year in revenue using that sticker on the top. And then of course, we taught that in stick Strategy Secrets and Russell Brunson, pretty much Russell steals everything.

We're just going to say soul.

Yeah, yeah. So he started using that on pretty much everything. But you know, you can. Amazon could. Anything physical. Anything physical is real estate to engage people. So this is just one more channel, but it happens to be probably the most important and most highest response channel that currently exists right now, other than the ability to go face to face and meet somebody face to face. But you can't. So, you know, to go back to selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do, you know, to get them on the phone or face to face with you. And so this is an ELF technique. I look at everything that is automated, that is robotic, that is highly replicable, that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Week doesn't, you know. And that's what I would put under the category of elf. So I think this is one of the best and most effective ELF techniques that I have barely even scratched the surface on. And so that's why I wanted you to come here and share this. So anything we didn't talk about that we should talk about. Any motivational speech at the end you'd like to give here? Famous last words.

Anything. Famous last words. Just do it. Yeah, no, I think we covered a lot of. The most that I can cover without giving too much away, but just one more thing to drive it home. I've said this time and time again while I was up here, but be value first when you're going through this process. Really, guys, this is a tool for you to change people's lives and make people's lives better with your products and your services and your messages. And that's why we're in this, we want to get our ideas out into the world. So realize that this is a powerful tool. It's a direct tool and it has impact and it affects people's lives because it's in their hand all the time. So come at this. I look at monetization of this. Second, I look at value first. If you've got a continuity program or anything like that, use this to increase your stick. Make sure that this is something that's useful to people and not just to make money. And you'll end up making more money in the end by going at it from that approach. So when you're thinking about your SMS program, how you're going to get people into it, how you're going to get them to stay, and how you're going to talk to them, value first. I'm sure you've heard it a million times before for other communication channels, but for SMS more than anything else, be careful with it. Use it the right way and come at it with value.

Awesome. What is the link we had for the thing on? I can't even remember on. I love marketing.

I lovemarketing.com. amanda. And you'll have access to the podcast. And then I gave. All of the platform recommendations that I made are on that page as well. And then there's a link to the course.

Okay. And that's how people get it there.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Did you guys find this valuable?

Yes.

Okay, awesome. Give it up. Amanda Dobson. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you so much. Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you. Watch them.