Neville Medhora turned his blog into an automated sales machine by adding email capture to every post. He gets 5% of traffic to sign up, 5% of those buy at $500 each, generating six figures annually with no ongoing work. The system runs on autopilot while he travels.
Chapters
What's up everybody? How was lunch? I didn't eat lunch and I downed some cold brew, so we'll see how this goes. So first, before I get started, I want to tell you a little bit about myself. So my name is Neville Medhora. My main thing I focus on right now is Kapsumo, misspelled with 2 Ks. And I'm also a part of a bunch of other companies. And I'm gonna tell you how this came about. I'm part of a couple things, AppSumo, The Hustle, Real Savvy, Pink Java, a bunch of other things. And the way that I got all these cushy gigs where I barely do any work yet somehow bring in an income is through building a machine that does most of it for me. I am a total super lazy person, and I still do work and stuff, but what I noticed in the beginning was that every time I did something, I would have this dip, and I'm gonna explain that. So the very first way that I got like any notoriety online was I started a personal blog called Nevblog in 2004. So actually November 17th, 2004 is when it actually started, and back then like no one made money from blogs. It was like for like 16-year-olds talking about their feelings. It was kind of a joke to have a blog. So when my friends found out I had a blog called Nevblog, they just till this day call me Nevblog all the time. And it was nevblog.blogspot.com, and it was called Neville's Financial Blog. And the tagline was super cheesy, was tracking the road to financial success from the age of 22. And, and I just stupid college kid, I was a bit of a hustler. I was doing all sorts of stuff on the side, and I was like, how do I track all the money that I'm making? And without using expensive software and stuff, I thought, well, a blog is a nice chronological way to document everything. So I put up all the assets I had, and at 22, like, I thought I was hella rich. Like, I had $10,000+ in cash and then like a stock count. I thought I was super rich, and compared to my friends, I was. And so I started listing out everything I did, and then also how I made the money. So I owned a rave company at the time. I started a little, what I called an agency, but it was really just me making web pages, called Resumite. So I made resume websites, Resumite, I don't know, I thought it was kind of cool. And so I started publishing on this blog regularly, and lo and behold, people just somehow started finding out about it. I didn't tell anyone. It just started taking off. And so I started, I was encouraged by this. I got that little taste of like, "Ooh, someone's reading." So I started posting more of my money and in more detail. And just a short year later, I had $26,000. And I was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool." Putting my stuff out there gets me attention and it keeps me accountable. It makes me want to make more money. So I'd list out everything I made. For my Rave company, and I guess January 2005, I made $502 in profit. It's just helpful to see that stuff there. My change jar had $30 in it. So I did all these different things and started listening in, right? And notice this one, it says water experiment down there, $5. So here's what that was. I started doing way crazier stuff than any other financial blogger out there. Most financial bloggers were doing stuff like, "I'm gonna do a money experiment," and they go sell their computer monitor on eBay. And I was like, "Dude, that's like, that's not really an experiment." So I wanted to shut down all the haters on my site that would be like, "You have to have money to make money." So I was like, "I bet I could get a homeless dude to make money on the side of the road." And I got this guy named Barry, who has a serious crack addiction, by the way, to sell a bunch of bottled water that I bought for $5. And we did this like 10 times with Barry and other homeless guys, and I published this. And this is like 2005, 2006, so this was not revolutionary, but it was super interesting for back then, right? So this was kind of like a weird thing. My parents were like, "What? Why are you even doing this? Like, what is the purpose of this?" And it got me a little bit of attention, which was kind of cool. So you get a big boost of traffic, and it feels really good, and it makes you want to do more I want more of that stuff. So then I did even more stuff. One of the ways I would network with like really rich people is I would crash parties. I had some mentors and they would tell me about these crazy parties that they're going to with like Michael Dell and Lance Armstrong. And I bought a crappy suit for $100 from K&G's Men's Warehouse and would crash all of them. And would have to blend in. And so, the top left one, that's the Prime Minister of Malaysia. I, we, I'm not gonna say I stole something, but yada yada yada, we surpassed an FBI background check to get in the room with 25 press members for that one. And then, um, and that's Lance Armstrong, the CEO of Gibson Guitars. There's Herb Kelleher. I knew he loved whiskey and smoking, so I bought cigarettes and booze and took a picture with him. And I'd post all these exploits online. It was like borderline, well, not borderline, sometimes illegal stuff. And This was another one, like, my parents didn't talk to me for like a week after I did this. This homeless thing kept coming up with people, and I was like, "What if I just go homeless and see what happens? Like, what's the worst that could happen?" So for 4 nights, 5 days, I like went homeless. I grew out my beard. That was me at the end, like, I truly felt homeless in that picture. It was not fun. And then I did these mini experiments, like I bummed money and bought alcohol and got absolutely shithoused off this bottle of cheap Kentucky bourbon or whatever. And the next day, I woke up in a park covered in ants. And I would publish this stuff online. And it actually worked. This is the Wall Street Journal in Russia business section. Someone sent that to me, and it says, "Nevblog" up there somewhere. And I was getting featured in publications, and I was like, "Dude, this is kind of awesome." Like, that's how my parents found out about it. I was in the New York Times, and one of their friends was like, "Neville's in the New York Times, congratulations." And they're like, "What?" And they saw that I was publishing money that I made online, which for Indian parents is like super taboo. But here's the thing, all this stuff, all these crazy experiments, doing way more than other people would do, and here's the result. After 10 years, Nevblog traffic, like for real, was just flat. There was roughly 15,000 you know, average per month coming to the site. But it was kind of disappointing because if you do something for 10 years and you're in the same place, like, I don't know, I think you just suck at it, or it's— that's not very encouraging, right? So what would happen was I would do these crazy experiments. I would do the bottled water experiment and my traffic would spike up, but then you have to top it, right? So there's like a dip that happens. And the first day you get 30% less traffic, and then 50% on top of that, and you're back to normal. Then I would do— I'd go homeless, and I got a bunch of traffic, and then it would go down. And I would crash a party, and it would go up, and then it would go down. And it was just like a treadmill. It was just like in place. I could never grow past a certain size despite putting so much time and effort into it. And then, I was like, wait a second. Here's the problem. I put out a piece of content, and then it dips. It goes up, and then it dips. And then I have to wait a while before I do something else crazy. And then it goes up, and then it dips. And then people who saw one experiment didn't see all the other things that I did. So I implemented an autoresponder for the next big website I actually made. And here are the results of that. So this is Copywriting Course traffic over the same course of period as Neuvlog, same 10-year span or whatever that is. And that one went up and to the right and is still going, right? And it's actually, it's not comparable. This is actually like 4 times more traffic or something like that. And the difference between Neuvlog and Copywriting Course was from the very beginning when it became a company on January 1st, 2015, I implemented an autoresponder and email capture or contact capture on every single page that there was. That was the biggest mistake I ever made with Neuvblog, and after 10 years, it's still in the exact same place because of that. Because just people see the stuff and then they leave. So what's an autoresponder and why should you implement it for really any business you have if you're doing something online? It's just a piece of software that delivers an email for you. So on this day, it delivers this email. On this day, it delivers this email. On this day, and so forth. That's all it is. It's really, really, really simple, but profoundly game-changing. So with Nevblog, my personal blog, people read the content, be like, "Wow, this guy's crazy," and then, I don't know, they just leave. They just leave. And unless they type in my name to their browser, they would never find me again. Or if they just happened to stumble upon me, otherwise I had no control over that audience. So, Neuvlog was a personal blog. Is that image that funny? Oh, cool. Nice. So Neuvlog was a personal blog, so it wasn't my main source of revenue. So I never minded that dip. It was kind of like, "Okay, whatever. That's just the nature of things." But if you have a business and you're putting out content all the time and you go up and then down, up and then down, up and then down, and you're not growing, that's literally just throwing money in the toilet for your marketing efforts. So with an autoresponder, they come, read your content, and assuming that you get their info, that you're successful at that, you can send them more content and more content and more content, occasionally sell them something. More content, and you can annoy them forever. I prefer to educate and, you know, give them good stuff. So the reason you're all here today is because The Hustle got your email address. 100% of you, I'm assuming that's how you got here for the most part. It's just this simple process, and people tend to still put up content till this day and not spend any time trying to get the customer's contact info. And here's everything I use to build my own machine. It's, it's really simple. I use the Sumo.com tool. That's just an email pop-up tool. It's really that simple. You just install that. I use WP Engine for my hosting of WordPress. I use LeadPages for some landing pages and email stuff. And then Infusionsoft. I use that for my autoresponder. But you can use AWeber, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Infusionsoft. They're all the same thing, right? It's just an autoresponder. Now, how can you build your own machine either for an existing business or a current one? I'll take you inside of mine. So this is inside of my Infusionsoft. I apologize the things are so small. I'll zoom in in a second. But if you see what's going on, this is about 64 of my posts on Copywriting Course, which is now like the largest copywriting blog, and there's about 100 posts total. That's it. There's 100 pieces of content, if not, if maybe like 95 or something. This is 64 of them. And what you are seeing is each post goes— people sign up for the form and it either throws them into 2 buckets. That they're an existing member, in which case it does nothing because I already got them on the email list. And then the second bucket is that it kicks them into that autoresponder. So this is an example of a download I have at the end of every post. If you haven't noticed, my style of drawing and stuff is very, very cheesy, and I like it. So this is at the end of a How to Get Your Facebook Post Seen. Okay, it talks about how to game Facebook, and I make this cheesy-looking ebook download thing, and people sign up to this. They, they want the whole post to either copy or read or share with their colleagues. In PDF or Google Doc format. So they just click that, they enter their email address, and bam, the machine takes over. I don't have to do anything. It doesn't matter. The machine has them now. I've got 'em. So let's zoom in on just like a cross-section of this to just show you an example of how the machine works. So let's look at the top left over there. It says Writer's Block, right? And there's Old Member, and then start KK sequence, start copywriting course sequence. And that's the only one we're worried about, the ones that are highlighted. Now the start KK sequence on this one has zero. So that means in this month, couple people, three people, or a couple people have signed up to the writer's block post, but no new people have signed up. So okay, the machine is relatively ineffective there. Second one, email open rates download, zero people, nothing. But then the next one, The copywriter salary one, look at that, 7 of my old members signed up, so who cares about that. Then 23 new people signed up. So I didn't do anything for that. People just found me through links, SEO, whatever you have it, and signed up. And then it goes through an autoresponder. And then another post got 50 people, the recurring revenue calculator, looks like 50 people downloaded that this month. If you total all of these up, this is just one, this is 16 posts. That adds up to 333 new subscribers. And this is just a small cross-section. There's about 100 posts. So every month without having actually done anything, like if I get hit by a bus, these still get collected, which is pretty great. So here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is a how to become a copywriter post. A lot of people ask this question, so I made an article on it and it gets people. and in about a little over a year, it's got 105,000 unique page views. Generally, historically, overall site-wide through the years, my conversion rate has been about 5% of people will sign up to my website from just random traffic. So that's about 5,000+ new people. Of those, 5% buy something at an average rate of $500 each. That's about $100,000-something in revenue that I didn't do anything for. I had no involvement from it whatsoever. I made the content once and then it just repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats ad nauseam. And for $100,000-something in revenue in one year, here's all that was that I had to do. I just made that little, once again, one of those cheesy little ebook download things. I said, I know this post is hella long, so download this post and read it later. That was it. And all these people downloaded it, and then I got their email, and then the autoresponder took over. I'll show you that in a second too. So here's another one. This one's not even about copywriting. It's called "How to Scam People for Money." So this is like a humorous piece I wanted to write. I thought it was kind of like a joke, but it actually kind of took off. And look, 160,000 unique page views in about a year, a little over a year. So that equated to about 8,000 new people and 404 customers. That is roughly $200-something thousand worth of revenue I had no involvement in and did nothing for. So even if I was dead, this would have happened, which is super cool. And for that one, all I did, I didn't even make the little book. I just said, send me emails. I said, you can use these psychological tricks for good or evil, your choice. Sign up to the email list and start learning every week. That's all. If you just add something like that at the bottom of every post, you too can have this. So when I talk about the machine, this is literally what it is. This is a screenshot of what the machine is. It's, it's just an autoresponder. It's just laid out so it looks kind of cool. So it's not that revolutionary. AWeber, MailChimp, anything you use will do this. Okay, so people sign up. And then between 6 AM and 9 PM, it sends them that first email called "This email will teach you how to write better." In 2 days at 7 AM, it will send them that next one, "How copywriting changed my life." 2 days later, "The email script that changed my life." So the first 3 don't sell anything. They just give good copywriting information because that's what they're usually looking for. The second 2, the 4th and 5th emails, try to sell a digital product. That's the only time I sell in this entire sequence. And then from there on, it just gives them good information again. But this is all automated. So once someone goes in that top, it goes boop, boop, boop, boop, it just keeps on going. And I don't have to do anything. And then for 4 to 6 months, they get more content. And it's very helpful stuff. It's not just trying to sell them anything. So the first one is a street advertising experiment where we We redid a sandwich board for a shoe hospital and it got 50% more walk-ins. And we don't even get them to the site. It just sends them everything in the email, kind of like The Hustle does. And then the next one, it'll go to copywriting books, my favorite copywriting books, copywriting exercises, how to write in a proper tone of voice, etc., etc., etc. And this is all on the machine, which is super cool. So here's why it's awesome to build a machine. I hate that word passive income because it assumes that you do nothing. But it really does take out the sharp edges of your work. So I don't have to be doing crazy stuff every day. I don't have to be writing articles every day. In fact, I write maybe 1 or 2 a month now, and that's just enough. The autoresponder does all the rest of the work. So here's me and my buddy Noah just chilling in San Juan this year, and I was just reading most of the time. I was reading the Judd Apatow book. The whole time. That was my goal for the whole trip. And I did a little bit of work here and there, hour or two here or there every day, but I didn't have to do anything. This is us just chilling on the beach. And yeah, you don't— I just realized I probably should have put a shirtless pic or picture of that. But, uh, and then also here, I love coming to San Francisco. I actually live in Austin, but during the summers and stuff, I come over here because it's way better, cool people, etc. And I don't have to do that much while I'm here because the machine is taking care of most of the lifting. The machine is currently nurturing 20,000 clients or something. I don't even know. It doesn't matter to me. It's just a machine. I get to hang out at The Hustle with Gus and Sid. I threw a Conor McGregor fight party. And all during that, the machine was working and working and working and working and working, which allows me to do, you know, more of what I like to do. So there's only one Neville. There's only me. But I'm up here talking. I can't do anything else right now. But when you build a machine out like this, you get many Nevilles. So that guy sends the first email, that guy sends a second email, the third one, and you can clone yourself. And so if you want to build your own machine, I'll leave you with this. The only thing you have to do is collect info on every page, build a machine that removes the dips in the business where you put something out and then it dips, just remove that and build a machine that works for you. And then you too could be hella lazy like me. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
