[Progress] Building a $1M business from scratch

[klaptoo]

Hello folks from FLF,

In this post I propose to update you guys with my progress towards a simple goal:

Build a $1M business from scratch. With no money, no list, and no expertise.

--

Before I move on, here's my brief story for context:

I'm 23 years old, graduated in advertising and marketing from a top tier school in Brazil.

In 2016, at my last semester in university, I started a online game business with my brother.

We managed to get funded pretty easily since the idea was solid and our background was good enough.

Fast forward a year and we finally launch our business (February 2017).

In a couple of months we got a really decent traction and become the biggest game in our category in the entire Brazilian market.

But, as all of this is happening, we begin to question our game.

To question if its ever going to be profitable.

To question if we're doing something that will really gets us money.

From that doubt we started slowly to stop believing in our startup.

Even worst, all this time we didn't earn money.

We didn't have a salary and I had to consult part-time to pay my bills.

We managed to be in this situation till this very day, but now, we have a different goal.

We stopped operating this start up and started focusing in and education (information) business.

We chose a hot niche that we really enjoy talking about and studying.

--

Enter the new opportunity.

I have this feeling about heavily funded startups.

They're binary, which means they are either a 1 or a 0.

They're either a huge success or a complete failure.

I tried this road before, but I just got devastated.

Now, I want to enter a type of business that has huge profit margins, scales easily and that I can fully control.

I'm talking about an info-business.

At first, me and my brother thought about an esoteric niche.

Huge demand, huge profits, but something we didn't like.

So we moved to a much brighter opportunity.

A niche that get's hotter every day and that we actually enjoy talking about.

I won't go into the details, but that's everything you need to know:

1. A niche with a big enough market
2. That has people that have money and are willing to expend

That happened 2 weeks ago.

The moment we first had the idea.

Last week, it was time for us to see if the idea does actually work, that is, if we can actually sell it.

But there were 4 problems.

1. We don't have money to buy ads.
2. We don't have a list.
3. We don't have a product.
4. And we don't have the expertise.

So what did we do?

We went "a la Jay Abraham" (note: if you don't know who he is, search for him and buy his book).

At first, we got ourselves an expert, and promised 25% of the products revenue.

Then, we got partners to promote our webinar (our sales mechanism).

We had the webinar last Thursday, and promoted a pre-sale offer.

The results?

7 sales and a total of $1.952.

Not bad for us that had nothing.

It proved our concept.

It proved people are willing to buy this content.

Now we are moving to week 2.

Here are our top priorities for this week:

1. record the video course that we pre-sold
2. start an youtube channel (a hot mkt channel for this niche. Lots of searches and little/weak competition)
3. interview our buyers. This will help us build our buyer persona and narrow our marketing efforts

Thoughts?

--

Btw, we're still testing prices and offers, but our focus is to have at least 3 products:

1. Membership (monthly report) $50 - $200
2. Tripwire (low tier offer to acquire customers) $5 - $50
3. Core offer (a video course) $300 - $1.000

And we plan to get $50k to $100k of investment to start buying ads. (This is a market that is hot, so we see the need to move quickly and grow fast).


PS: I think it's important to say what skills made me able to launch this new business in just a week.

• Marketing. Actual marketing, as in "get customers", and not academic marketing.
• Copywriting. Copy = selling. I had to use copy to convince the experts and the list owners, as I had to use it to convince prospects to buy. Copy is the mother of all skills. "Copy is King".
• Website building and wordpress.

PS: I'm using "$" as the currency to make things easier, but my entire business is set on Brazil's actual currency, which is "brazilian real", worth something like $0,30 each.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

We managed to get funded pretty easily since the idea was solid and our background was good enough.

Fast forward a year and we finally launch our business (February 2017).

In a couple of months we got a really decent traction and become the biggest game in our category in the entire Brazilian market.

But, as all of this is happening, we begin to question our game.

To question if its ever going to be profitable.

To question if we're doing something that will really gets us money.

From that doubt we started slowly to stop believing in our startup.

Even worst, all this time we didn't earn money.

How can this happen?

What was your revenue model?

If people are downloading your game, you should be having in-app purchases or upgrades or something. Was no one upgrading or buying the mega-rocket launcher?

 

[ocricci]

Hi @klaptoo



watching your thread and progress - and wishing success

 

[klaptoo]

How can this happen?

What was your revenue model?

If people are downloading your game, you should be having in-app purchases or upgrades or something. Was no one upgrading or buying the mega-rocket launcher?

Yes, the revenue model is bad.

Actually, no game in our category is making money.

Our demographics is the probably one of the worst to sell to, young males (15-25).

The only way this business could work, we figured, was to joint venture with a big media company. We almost managed to make that happen and our partners are still trying to arrange this deal.

Sure, we could sell some ads, but still, we thought it was better now to focus in another business and let this one with our other partners.

 

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[klaptoo]

Yesterday we managed to record half the classes from our course.

Today, we are building the slides for the second half.

I think the process we're going through might be useful for your guys:

We build a google sheets with the following columns:

Lessons, owner, status, notes.

We then use to spreadsheet to know which courses have been made, who is responsible for each single lesson and what status it is.

--

Moving on.

Today I also managed to schedule quick calls with everyone that bought our course.

We are asking the following questions:

1. Where did they know us from?
2. How old are they?
3. What do they work with?
4. What results they expect from our course?

(Ideas on what else we should be asking them?)

(We thought about some copy research questions like: "what was happening in your life when you went looking for a solution like ours? "why did you choose us over our competitors?" and "did you hesitate before buying our course? If yes, then why?" - Btw, I love this questions)

So far I made 3 calls and everybody seemed really comfortable to chat with me. They apprecciated the effort.

The reasoning behind me calling them is the following:

1. Reduce buyer's remorse and refunds
2. Acknowledge myself as an "adviser" and not just a business man that wants to sell them
3. Understand our buyers and build a buyer persona
4. Once we do that, we can then be more focused in our targeting and choose the best marketing channels plus sales arguments

Following steps for tomorrow are:

1. Record lessons
2. Edit lessons
3. Upload them to a course platform (invanto.com)
4. Build our financial model

We already want to build a financial model so we can than raise some money.

We could try the bootstrap way but we think is better to go full speed now so we don't lose our industry hype. Plus, we do need the money from our first sales, so bootstrapping would take even longer to reach our goals.

Thoughts?

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Moved outside per request of OP.

 

[klaptoo]

Today is the day I'm editing the videos (lessons) of our course and upload them to our online platform.

Rendering each video is taking quite a while which is a pain in the a**.

If I had the money I'd definitely outsource this step.

Today's actions are:

1. Upload all videos into our platform
2. Record first video for our youtube channel
3. Finish our financial model
4. Start writing our short ebook (that is going to be sold as a 'tripwire' - low entry offer)

I'll expand a little on each topic.

--


The youtube channel:

We decided to start a channel because we Identified as a good channel for our niche. For 4 reasons.

First, search for the topics on our niche are increasing a lot.

Second, there's little competition.

Third, it can scale and it doesn't cost us money. (But it does cost a good amount of time.

And fourth, it establishes ourselves as authorities.

--

The financial model.

As I said before, we plan to raise 50k to invest in marketing. Why so fast? Because we don't want to lose momentum.

For those of you who are not familiar, financial model is basically a giant spreadsheet in which you input the key assumptions for your business growth.

For example, in our case we're building our first sheet with our assumptions.

Things like: CPC, Product price, opt-in %, sales % (conversion), etc....

This is a really good exercise even when you're not raising money.

It's a good way to break your revenue goals into real data that can explain rationally the case for your business.

So for example, if you say you want to have 10k revenue in a given month you know that you need to spend 1k on traffic, which would get you 300 subscribers, which in turn would lead to 100 buyers of $100 each.

This is just an example but we're doing something similar.

--

The ebook.

Our ebook is to serve as a tripwire, a low price offer that gets people to buy - with low entry barriers.

We have some experience writing and we already managed to write 10 pages.

Our goal is to have 70 pages of solid content.

The way we do that is by actually doing the work. Looking for multiple sources and condensing the essential information.

Also is good to note that we surveyed 150 people and asked: "what is your biggest question about [our topic]".

These questions are serving us well as we write the book.

--

That's it for today.

Thoughts?

 

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[klaptoo]

Ok, day 4 of my journey into a a $1M business.

We have already 15 pages for our ebook, and we uploaded our course to our platform.

Yesterday I wasn't able to record my first youtube video, but I shall do it today.

As we want to raise money to grow quickly, we are thinking about two options:
1) Raise for equity
2) Borrow money

The cons of doing an equity deal is, uh, giving up equity and having a low valuation since we're just starting out.

That's why we're thinking about borrowing money.

But, on the other hand, if we raise money with knowledgeable people, we can have mentors and people that have a stake in the game, pushing us forward, making connections, etc...

What do you guys think?

(Either way, we are looking for money from friends, as we want to raise quickly.)

Btw, is anyone actually watching this thread? Shall I continue with daily updates?

 

[ocricci]

Btw, is anyone actually watching this thread? Shall I continue with daily updates?

yes, please continue

 

[klaptoo]

Day 5 of my journey here.

Today we released our first membership report (that we plan to sell for $97 later on).

I'm not a designer but I do have some basic notions of design, which is helping me a lot lately. Competitors in our niche do offer similar things but with poor design. That's why I thought it would be wise to invest some time into a good looking pdf.

Fortunately, this is easy to do nowadays.

I just got a good template from canva.com (one for my cover and one for the content background), changed a few things and then downloaded everything as a jpeg.

I then went ahead and uploaded those images to powerpoint (which is way better to use than canva for pdf ebooks).

So thinking about this, I would definitely add Design as a must have skill for entrepreneurship.

You don't have to be a pro, but you have to be good enough.

--

Ok, back to our goals.

We are now already making our list of potential investors/lenders. Also, we have already finished our financial model and pitch deck.

Now, is just a matter of contacting people and pitching them our idea.

We want to raise at least 25k.

I'll tell you guys about the results later on, but we want to move really fast, as in, raising this money by the end of next week.

Looking back to my top priorities for the week (posted here on monday):

"
Here are our top priorities for this week:

1. record the video course that we pre-sold
2. start an youtube channel (a hot mkt channel for this niche. Lots of searches and little/weak competition)
3. interview our buyers. This will help us build our buyer persona and narrow our marketing efforts

"

We did manage to get them checked (except for the youtube channel), but, I think we advanced even more, having already started the ebook, finished our first member report, and finished our finacial model/ pitch deck.

We have moved a lot in just 2 weeks since starting and we hope to move even more.

 

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[ocricci]

We want to raise at least 25k.

Why ? Is it advertising costs ?

 

[Ray Goslin]

Hello folks from FLF,

In this post I propose to update you guys with my progress towards a simple goal:

Build a $1M business from scratch. With no money, no list, and no expertise.

--

Before I move on, here's my brief story for context:

I'm 23 years old, graduated in advertising and marketing from a top tier school in Brazil.

In 2016, at my last semester in university, I started a online game business with my brother.

We managed to get funded pretty easily since the idea was solid and our background was good enough.

Fast forward a year and we finally launch our business (February 2017).

In a couple of months we got a really decent traction and become the biggest game in our category in the entire Brazilian market.

But, as all of this is happening, we begin to question our game.

To question if its ever going to be profitable.

To question if we're doing something that will really gets us money.

From that doubt we started slowly to stop believing in our startup.

Even worst, all this time we didn't earn money.

We didn't have a salary and I had to consult part-time to pay my bills.

We managed to be in this situation till this very day, but now, we have a different goal.

We stopped operating this start up and started focusing in and education (information) business.

We chose a hot niche that we really enjoy talking about and studying.

--

Enter the new opportunity.

I have this feeling about heavily funded startups.

They're binary, which means they are either a 1 or a 0.

They're either a huge success or a complete failure.

I tried this road before, but I just got devastated.

Now, I want to enter a type of business that has huge profit margins, scales easily and that I can fully control.

I'm talking about an info-business.

At first, me and my brother thought about an esoteric niche.

Huge demand, huge profits, but something we didn't like.

So we moved to a much brighter opportunity.

A niche that get's hotter every day and that we actually enjoy talking about.

I won't go into the details, but that's everything you need to know:

1. A niche with a big enough market
2. That has people that have money and are willing to expend

That happened 2 weeks ago.

The moment we first had the idea.

Last week, it was time for us to see if the idea does actually work, that is, if we can actually sell it.

But there were 4 problems.

1. We don't have money to buy ads.
2. We don't have a list.
3. We don't have a product.
4. And we don't have the expertise.

So what did we do?

We went "a la Jay Abraham" (note: if you don't know who he is, search for him and buy his book).

At first, we got ourselves an expert, and promised 25% of the products revenue.

Then, we got partners to promote our webinar (our sales mechanism).

We had the webinar last Thursday, and promoted a pre-sale offer.

The results?

7 sales and a total of $1.952.

Not bad for us that had nothing.

It proved our concept.

It proved people are willing to buy this content.

Now we are moving to week 2.

Here are our top priorities for this week:

1. record the video course that we pre-sold
2. start an youtube channel (a hot mkt channel for this niche. Lots of searches and little/weak competition)
3. interview our buyers. This will help us build our buyer persona and narrow our marketing efforts

Thoughts?

--

Btw, we're still testing prices and offers, but our focus is to have at least 3 products:

1. Membership (monthly report) $50 - $200
2. Tripwire (low tier offer to acquire customers) $5 - $50
3. Core offer (a video course) $300 - $1.000

And we plan to get $50k to $100k of investment to start buying ads. (This is a market that is hot, so we see the need to move quickly and grow fast).


PS: I think it's important to say what skills made me able to launch this new business in just a week.

• Marketing. Actual marketing, as in "get customers", and not academic marketing.
• Copywriting. Copy = selling. I had to use copy to convince the experts and the list owners, as I had to use it to convince prospects to buy. Copy is the mother of all skills. "Copy is King".
• Website building and wordpress.

PS: I'm using "$" as the currency to make things easier, but my entire business is set on Brazil's actual currency, which is "brazilian real", worth something like $0,30 each.

Hey klaptoo. Well done. Info-marketing is the best business. People are hungry for information

 

[klaptoo]

Why ? Is it advertising costs ?

Yes, exactly.

Hey klaptoo. Well done. Info-marketing is the best business. People are hungry for information

Thanks Ray! Yeah, info seems great.

 

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[klaptoo]

Hello guys, day 6 of my journey here. (I'm not counting weekends).

We're moving really fast.

Yesterday we managed to get our $25k we were hoping for.

Though we did give up a lot of equity (30%), but we've seen it as a strategic move, as the investor is already inside our niche with a considerable sized list (+50k emails). Also, he will support us with lawyers, accountants, know-how, office, etc...

As we want to move fast, it made sense for us to accept the terms.

Better to have 70% of something than 30% of nothing, right?

So our goals for the week are the following:

• Finish writing and editing our ebook
• Write copy for our facebook ads and landing pages
• Write copy for our emails (the ones we'll send to upsell course buyers to our membership site)
• Write a long article on medium about our niche (to show we know what we're talking about - build credibility and authority)
• We also might hire an SEO agency and a logo designer

I'll be updating you guys.

So far, this has been pretty good. We're amazed out how fast things are moving and we hope to keep this speed.

 

[Destined]

Hello folks from FLF,

In this post I propose to update you guys with my progress towards a simple goal:

Build a $1M business from scratch. With no money, no list, and no expertise.

--

Before I move on, here's my brief story for context:

I'm 23 years old, graduated in advertising and marketing from a top tier school in Brazil.

In 2016, at my last semester in university, I started a online game business with my brother.

We managed to get funded pretty easily since the idea was solid and our background was good enough.

Fast forward a year and we finally launch our business (February 2017).

In a couple of months we got a really decent traction and become the biggest game in our category in the entire Brazilian market.

But, as all of this is happening, we begin to question our game.

To question if its ever going to be profitable.

To question if we're doing something that will really gets us money.

From that doubt we started slowly to stop believing in our startup.

Even worst, all this time we didn't earn money.

We didn't have a salary and I had to consult part-time to pay my bills.

We managed to be in this situation till this very day, but now, we have a different goal.

We stopped operating this start up and started focusing in and education (information) business.

We chose a hot niche that we really enjoy talking about and studying.

--

Enter the new opportunity.

I have this feeling about heavily funded startups.

They're binary, which means they are either a 1 or a 0.

They're either a huge success or a complete failure.

I tried this road before, but I just got devastated.

Now, I want to enter a type of business that has huge profit margins, scales easily and that I can fully control.

I'm talking about an info-business.

At first, me and my brother thought about an esoteric niche.

Huge demand, huge profits, but something we didn't like.

So we moved to a much brighter opportunity.

A niche that get's hotter every day and that we actually enjoy talking about.

I won't go into the details, but that's everything you need to know:

1. A niche with a big enough market
2. That has people that have money and are willing to expend

That happened 2 weeks ago.

The moment we first had the idea.

Last week, it was time for us to see if the idea does actually work, that is, if we can actually sell it.

But there were 4 problems.

1. We don't have money to buy ads.
2. We don't have a list.
3. We don't have a product.
4. And we don't have the expertise.

So what did we do?

We went "a la Jay Abraham" (note: if you don't know who he is, search for him and buy his book).

At first, we got ourselves an expert, and promised 25% of the products revenue.

Then, we got partners to promote our webinar (our sales mechanism).

We had the webinar last Thursday, and promoted a pre-sale offer.

The results?

7 sales and a total of $1.952.

Not bad for us that had nothing.

It proved our concept.

It proved people are willing to buy this content.

Now we are moving to week 2.

Here are our top priorities for this week:

1. record the video course that we pre-sold
2. start an youtube channel (a hot mkt channel for this niche. Lots of searches and little/weak competition)
3. interview our buyers. This will help us build our buyer persona and narrow our marketing efforts

Thoughts?

--

Btw, we're still testing prices and offers, but our focus is to have at least 3 products:

1. Membership (monthly report) $50 - $200
2. Tripwire (low tier offer to acquire customers) $5 - $50
3. Core offer (a video course) $300 - $1.000

And we plan to get $50k to $100k of investment to start buying ads. (This is a market that is hot, so we see the need to move quickly and grow fast).


PS: I think it's important to say what skills made me able to launch this new business in just a week.

• Marketing. Actual marketing, as in "get customers", and not academic marketing.
• Copywriting. Copy = selling. I had to use copy to convince the experts and the list owners, as I had to use it to convince prospects to buy. Copy is the mother of all skills. "Copy is King".
• Website building and wordpress.

PS: I'm using "$" as the currency to make things easier, but my entire business is set on Brazil's actual currency, which is "brazilian real", worth something like $0,30 each.

Information products/business models are very lucrative. unless you have a huge targeted list or tons of connected affiliates/jV partners, then it will be very hard to compete with the heavy hitters in the industry. Information marketing is also very saturated as well.

What makes your product(s), so much better than what's already out there and what's already being blasted on youtube. Your angle has to be different and unique....

You will either need a list, or your partners will need to have a list. if not you will need money to pay for ads (fb/adwords) or pay others that have a list and throw your promo in there.

It's a great business to get into, but unless people know YOU and your brand and actually trust you, then success will be very hard to come by.

Wish you lots of luck!

 

[klaptoo]

Information products/business models are very lucrative. unless you have a huge targeted list or tons of connected affiliates/jV partners, then it will be very hard to compete with the heavy hitters in the industry. Information marketing is also very saturated as well.

What makes your product(s), so much better than what's already out there and what's already being blasted on youtube. Your angle has to be different and unique....

You will either need a list, or your partners will need to have a list. if not you will need money to pay for ads (fb/adwords) or pay others that have a list and throw your promo in there.

It's a great business to get into, but unless people know YOU and your brand and actually trust you, then success will be very hard to come by.

Wish you lots of luck!

Thanks Destined!

I agree with most you said.

The info-biz is saturated? Yes, depending on what niche your talking about. My niche is new and not yet sophisticated or mature.

We just raised some money to be put on ads, which shall get us to a next level, in which we are able to put our profits into more ads.

Also, yes, we do have access to some highly targeted lists, which should help us a lot. Especially to build credibility and authority.

Thanks for your inputs.

 

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[klaptoo]

Day 7 of my journey.

This week we're not holding any webinar because of a holiday we have on Friday.

We decided to use this week to build all of our marketing material:

• Ads and email copy
• Ads design
• Sales pages copy and design
• CRM
• our ebook
• etc...

It's a lot of things so this shall keep us busy.

As we won't be selling anything I might skip posting for the rest of the week. If something interesting happens, or I learn a lesson, I'll be sure to post it though.

 

[klaptoo]

Day 10.

We used this week to build our marketing material, copy, funnels, etc...

So far, we've managed to do most of that.

As a tip I could give, that is helping us move so fast, is to use trello.

I absolutely love trello, and here's how our board looks like:



I'll explain each column:

1. Materials: these are made of cards that don't get moved a lot. For example: we make link to our marketing plan on google docs. Also, we have an image with our goal of revenue for the year, breaking down the revenue for each month. This shall keep us motivated and focuse d.
2. To do: thing to do in the week.
3. Doing: things we're doing in the day
4. Done: things that we done in the day
5. Done (week): thinks that were done in the week.
6. Ideas: ideas we have for the biz
7. Backlog: things we need to do that are not urgent.

Two important things to notice are: we assign each card to the task owner and we set deadlines for each task.

This makes everyone more accountable and productive.

 

[HackVenture]

Wow this massive action is awesome, please keep the updates coming!

I was curious why you wanted to give away equity for advertising costs but it seems like you managed to get a strategic partner, that way it makes sense.

If you don't mind a quick suggestion, I saw that you intend to look for a SEO agency.

I'm pretty sure if you focus on this much execution and if your advertising is done well etc, you can save the money and time and headaches of hiring out your SEO and still do very very well.

All the best to you and I look forward to seeing you hit your target number!

 

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[klaptoo]

Wow this massive action is awesome, please keep the updates coming!

I was curious why you wanted to give away equity for advertising costs but it seems like you managed to get a strategic partner, that way it makes sense.

If you don't mind a quick suggestion, I saw that you intend to look for a SEO agency.

I'm pretty sure if you focus on this much execution and if your advertising is done well etc, you can save the money and time and headaches of hiring out your SEO and still do very very well.

All the best to you and I look forward to seeing you hit your target number!

Thanks mate!

Yep, we don't mind giving equity that much... Also, this is not like a SaaS or a startup that will need couple of rounds. This small investments should get the ball rolling.

Hmmm... I see your point about hiring the agency, and it makes sense. The only thing is that we really see SEO as a great acquisition channel, but we might focus first on paid ads.

 

[klaptoo]

Hey guys, day 11 of my journey here.

This week goals are:

1. Launch our mkt funnel
2. Sell 6k worth of products (about double of what we did at our first webinar, and about 20 courses)
3. Create and distribute 3 youtube videos

--

Our mkt funnel is:

Facebook ads > webinar registration > email to indoctrinate people and increase our attendance rate > webinar > replay follow up

--

Our youtube tactic:

Create 3 high quality videos, better of what our competitors have.

Then, we'll hire a freelancer to make a 200 contacts list of blogs and news portals.

Then, we'll pitch them with cold email, something like "Hey XXX company, I see you post a lot of stuff about YYY. We just made this video that we think suits very well with your audience......"

You get the point.

I'll let you guys know how this works out, but I already managed to get a guest post on a huge traffic website, doing a similar approach, but asking "what would you guys like for us to produce to your website, that would get us feature".

And this is a big lesson... Always propose deals having in mind what's in it for them. Show them clearly what you're doing for them.

 

[klaptoo]

Damm.

We're moving fast and this is really exciting.

This week we were going to test our funnels but we had a lot of problems with Facebook. So, we couldn't get any traffic from it.

Because of that we had to think fast and use our partner mailing list to get traffic to our webinar.

It worked.

We got 140 registrations and 30 people attended live.

The best part? We converted 7 of them into customers. This was huge.

More than 23% of sales conversion rate. Now, it is a matter of traffic. We felt the entire webinar pitch is really solid. I made the effort to think about every slide, every detail, and this is just our third webinar.

Things are looking good.

Also, we already hired 2 virtual assistants to help us with tasks. We dont want to hire full time employees yet so this seemed like a good Idea.

We also are planning to write a book about something our niche is forgeting to say. This will work to get us even more authority.

Man, this is exciting.

Crazy to think we had nothing couple of weeks ago.

 

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[PhillyPhil]

Wow I just learned a ton from this thread. Keep it up!

 

[klaptoo]

Day 20.

This has been an interesting week.

We're having a lot of problems to generate traffic.

Facebook and google are not allowing us to advertise.

We tried twitter but our CPC was waaaay to expensive, so we had to shut the campaign down.

Thus, we need to get creative, thinking about alternatives ways to generate traffic to our webinar.

So, we decided to give a try on the following traffic sources:

1. direct mail (old school copy to drive people to our webinar page. We want to frame it so as the prospect receives a "Password" that he can inputs to see our secret free class)
2. flyers - we'll distribute flyers to people outside events where our target market hangs out
3. alternative display networks - we're looking into the top 5 alternative display networks, like yahoo, criteo, etc...
4. Influencers (youtube and instagram) - in niches with target audiences similar to ours

Any ideas on how we can generate traffic?? Shoot them out please

Our target market:
Mid-class (predominately men), 28 to 50 years old. People that have jobs in which they own their schedule (ex: entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, biz owners, freelancers, etc...)

For context: we are generating traffic to our webinar, in which we teach and sell. The webinar is converting really well and our pitch is solid, so now we just need to get traffic to it.

 

[ocricci]

Day 20.
Any ideas on how we can generate traffic?? Shoot them out please

linkedin ?

 

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[hungryhippocampi]

klaptoo thanks for this thread. It really illustrates the principle of action over analysis = results. What I mean by this is you don't sit and do in-depth analysis on every detail prior to taking action but you take action, analyze results, adjust, take action, rinse, repeat. I love it!

A few questions for you:
1. Is it just you and your brother or do you have a larger team (other than VA's and equity partner)?
2. How have you utilized your expert thus far? Has he participated in webinars, written content, or just educated you guys?

Regarding advertising -- have you tried a circuitous route on FB/Google by using your article on Medium...advertising that, then using that article to redirect into your funnel?

 

[klaptoo]

klaptoo thanks for this thread. It really illustrates the principle of action over analysis = results. What I mean by this is you don't sit and do in-depth analysis on every detail prior to taking action but you take action, analyze results, adjust, take action, rinse, repeat. I love it!

A few questions for you:
1. Is it just you and your brother or do you have a larger team (other than VA's and equity partner)?
2. How have you utilized your expert thus far? Has he participated in webinars, written content, or just educated you guys?

Regarding advertising -- have you tried a circuitous route on FB/Google by using your article on Medium...advertising that, then using that article to redirect into your funnel?

Thanks mate!

1. Just me, my brother, the investor and the V.As
2. He has recorded our first course and he's doing content for our membership site
3. We thought about that but we don't think it'll be cost effective. Plus, we wouldn't have actual control, as any time facebook could come and shut us down.

 

[klaptoo]

Hey guys,

Day 24.

This week we had Holidays here in Brazil so we didn't get much done.

But, we decided to test 2 traffic sources.

1. Native advertising - (taboola and outbrain)
2. SMS

We built the funnel for it, expecting to test 2 different ones: one that goes directly to our webinar and another one that goes to a pre-frame page that shall hype our prospects to the webinar and increase opt-in conversion.

I'll let you guys know how it goes.

PS: interesting think to point out is how we chose our headlines for the Native Ads.
I brainstormed 50, yes, 50 possible headlines.

I then went ahead and passed them to my brother who bolded the ones he liked.

I then highlighted the ones I liked and finally choose the ones that were both highlighted and bolded.

So we now have 7 headlines to test in the platform itself.

 

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[MHP368]

Loving it , thanks for sharing!

 

[klaptoo]

Hey guys, day 30 of my journal here (counting only work days)

This week we tested 4 different traffic channels.

Native:
Outbrain, UOL (brazil's largest news portal) and Yahoo gamini
Search:
Bing


So far, our conversion goal (webinar registration) is faaar to expensive, but we've been told this is normal when starting native campaigns, as the system (for example Outbrain) takes some time to figure out how to optimize the ads delivery.

So, I guess we'll wait.

But something worst happened yesterday:

We had major problems with WebinarJam and had to shut our webinar down.

Actually, it got shut down automatically due to technical issues. Because of that we lost a lot of money (we spend more than 1k just driving traffic to this webinar....)

This made us think our entire strategy again, because it's the second time we have major problems with WebinarJam. We'll probably have to use a evergreen recorded webinar now...

To sum up:
This was a rough week but one that we learned a lot, now we'll focus on 2 things for next week:

1. Record a perpetual webinar to use as a video-sales-letter (though we will still frame it as a "live training". We'll probably use the EverWebinar tool for that, or we'll just hire some developers on workana to this for us.
2. Write our book. Then we will start promoting it as a tripwire book funnel.

That's it for now.

By the way, any other traffic ideas you think we could use?