Insight Track 18/3/24 – Mastering Business Growth

Here is the latest edition to me weekly share the journey, share the lesson video.  If you prefer to read please see the transcript below the  video

Transcript of the video

Hey there, Steve here and welcome along to this regular weekly video where I share my journey and the lessons I’m learning.

So we call it sharing the journey, sharing the learning. So what are we up to? Starting last week, Monday, we had the usual sort of mentoring with Paul, one of my mentors, where we discussed the importance of sort of finding the leaks within your business, the sort of places that you can improve.

And one thing that came out of that was sort that of looking back at your lead magnets, if you’re using lead magnets, if you’ve had them set up for any sort of  length of time, making sure that they are, you know, they’re perfect, if they’re not brilliant, you know, the graphics are not up to it or things like that. It sort of suggested that, that we should sort of go back and just review things that we’ve done in the past, because with AI, sort of designs and everything like that has sort of moved on. I think I first became aware of AI around, let me say, January last year, and I think most people, it was probably November the year previously, so that’s 2022.

Yeah, 2022. Anyway, yeah, sort of graphics and such things  have moved along rapidly over the last year, really. And yeah, Paul is a big advocate of using AI in your business.  Not to take the massive chunks of ChatGPT produced material and just sort of post it as is, use it as a  basis for your own interpretation of things, yeah, so you go through it, add your own little bits and pieces, make it your work, not purely ChatGPT.

Lead magnets, we were discussing lead magnets as well. So Chat GPT is excellent at creating brilliant lead magnets about various subjects, you know. Ask Chat GPT to write you an outline of a 10-point checklist on what you need, the basics of starting up an affiliate marketing business, for instance.

Within a couple of minutes you’ve got the outline and then you can ask it to sort of beef up, put some meat on the bones of that, take that away as your basis to sort of reformat, rewrite it and get yourself some really good and original content for your lead magnets. Obviously nobody else will be producing exactly the same, they won’t ask ChatGPT the same questions and the way you phrase them, so it’s going to be absolutely unique to you. Yeah, we were talking about the lead magnets being a sort of incredible offer, if you like, a big perceived value.

He’s a great proponent of the Russell Branson,  MIFGE, most incredible free gift ever principle. So yeah, so it’s all about giving a lot of value on your lead magnet to get people in basically.

So after that I went on to the Facebook advertising agency course (Training).

Now I did this back in, I think it was 22, it would be last year I started it. So last year, maybe February, I went on, I did the first sitting, if you like, of the Facebook advertising agency course, that tells you how to set up a Facebook advertising agency, obviously, and start making money, which I did do, I have done. I’ve had clients last year, I’ve still got clients.

It needs scaling now, yeah, but things happen in life that sometimes get in the way of these things.

So yeah, I’ve elected as part of my programme with that company, with Paul, to retake that as an option going forward. So the reason, as I say, I want to refresh and I’m also actually doing as I’m learning each different thing, I’ll relearn each different thing, I’m taking that each week and using it to create my own course on exactly the same topic.

So hopefully, maybe by the end of the year, I will have a course available on how to set up and run a profitable Facebook advertising agency. So yeah, so we’re creating, we did the creating adverts last week and some of the things I have to share with you that are very important is obviously with working with clients on an advertising agency, but also if you’re doing your own adverts for yourself, the importance of knowing your customer is very important so that you know who you’re marketing to, other men, other women, are they, what age are they, where do they hang, well, we hope they hang out on Facebook if you’re going to be on Facebook, what are their interests, what are the pain points, et, , and you got to get all that sorted out so that you are talking to those people in your advertising.

Facebook will do a brilliant job at targeting, at targeting, if you have clarity in your advertising, your clarity of your advert creative, your headline and your content, it must flow, it must be congruent and then with that sorted Facebook will show your advert to the right people and give you a lower cost per lead at the end of the day because it’s in their interest not to serve up adverts that their customers.  Their business is to keep people on their site as long as possible so they don’t want to be serving up stuff to people who aren’t interested, it’s going to, at the end of the day, it’s going to turn them off, make them get off the system if they’re getting stuff that is not relevant to them so relevance is very, important so knowing your customer is vital.

So we also looked at the value ladder, the course teachers that you should discuss with the perspective client the value ladder, so a value ladder which we should all use in our business anyway, is where you map out the value, the lifetime value of a customer,  It’s like the pipeline value, so people start on free, yeah free gift, then go up to the next level which may be something up to maybe 97, 100 dollars category, then you go up to the next level which is say up to 197 dollars, the next level 497 dollars and the next level 997 dollars, so you’ve got to have a clear pathway where you can proceed taking people through your value ladder to maximise the potential profit, profitability of that customer.

So creating the adverts.  There is a big debate around what works best, do photos work best or videos work best, there’s one answer to that, yes!  Both can work excellently you know,

Sam (the coach) says that you know he works on, well he manages ad spends of millions a year, so he has had photos that perform excellently and he’s had photos that perform bad, likewise he’s had videos that perform excellently, photos that perform not so good, so either will work

It’s the case of, as in everything online I think it’s a case of test, test, test – test different things, try different things, tweak different things and just see how things are going. So yeah, for photos obviously you, obviously Facebook is interruption advertising at the end of the day, it’s you’re gonna try and interrupt somebody’s scrolling through  Facebook.   So the first thing they’re going to see is the creative they call it, so it’s either a picture or a video, so the main thing to do, you’ve got to get that attention because if you don’t get that attention on your creative and maybe you’re heading a headline as well, you ain’t going to get people opening your post and looking at your message and, and taking your lead magnet and leaving their details, so bold colours on the, if it’s a photograph use bold colours.  Avoid blue and white, obviously, obvious reasons blue and white are Facebook colours so blue and white will just blend into Facebook and won’t do a lot for your click rate, so avoid blue, blues and whites in your Facebook ads.

Video, videos don’t have to be perfect, in fact the sort of most important thing is sort of transparency and being yourself, don’t try to be something you’re not, you know, if you would, if you’re English and you’ve got a Cockney accent, use your Cockney accent, yeah, don’t try and be something you’re not, don’t try and hide an accent or whatever, just be yourself and structure your, video, you know, if you’re not selling something high ticket keep your video around three minutes or less and your starting point should be what’s in it for me, what’s in it for the customer, that is the most important bit and then you go on to to outline the rest of the offer,   There’ll actually be, it’s not there yet but in my blog certainly by the time this, this video gets there on my blog there will be a post about creating a video for Facebook with, with the seven points that you need to take into consideration, write your sort of bullet points for each and get it shot.

Things that you may like to invest in if you’re doing videos is a tripod to hold your phone if you’re doing it by phone but phones are excellent, modern phones are excellent for taking excellent videos so there’s no need to sort of invest in cameras etc and  stuff like that so yeah see the blog post, it’s in there, the things that you can, yeah the, the, the, the important points to put in a, in a, in a video

On Wednesday last week we had the meeting with Dean, Dean Holland of Internet Profits, it’s a beginners, it’s called Beginners Advantage that he’s doing which includes training on, on, on affiliate system which is a new software suite for what I’ve got a word, you can do most of the things in your business which will be available from the ones, a few of us that are trying it at the moment, sort of I would, I would guess around the middle of the year, that’s my guess, don’t hold me to it, but yeah from, from what he’s saying yeah, it’s going to be available around the middle of the year so you know watch out for that yeah because I am, I’m doing a lot of work on there, I’m transferring a lot of my business to there and it will be available and I will be able to give you my own personal guidance as, as well as that you get from Dean and his team too.

So the other thing that happened on a Wednesday, I had my creditors meeting from the, offline business, the blind business on Wednesday, board meeting, creditors meeting, just basic red tape, I agreed to take on the, on the liquidators, and then as a creditor, as the chairman of the creditors committee, I agreed, also agreed that the creditors take over the business, not the creditors, sorry the liquidators, yeah it has to be done I guess, but you know it took 10 minutes, it was scheduled for, the, the board meeting was scheduled for 10 o’clock, we actually ran, we actually signed the minutes on, on Monday, so yeah and then at 10 30, no 10 15, I believe the, the creditors meeting was started, no creditors turned up, they never do, so it’s just a question of me as a creditor, which is, I’m owed wages at the end of the day, so I’m chairman of the creditors committee as well as ex-managing director of the company.

Anyway, that’s beside the point, Wednesday night we have a regular mastermind  with seven, well there’s seven of us all together, so six others, I like to call us the, the magnificent seven, because secretly when I grow up, I want to be a Wild West.hero, 😁   So I think we are, the team is pretty magnificent to be honest, we’re all on a similar, a similar sort of level, but each bring their own strengths and personalities, things they do better than, than some of the rest of us, to the table, then we can all benefit, and  I’m getting some good ideas from, from, from the others on there about, you know, video posting, email writing, and generally making videos, you know, it, it adds to what we’re doing with the, with the mentors each week I believe.

So also last week on a personal business level I, I launched, (actually it was a week before it got launched, but it, it started producing last week), a new funnel for a positive self-talk course, so I’ve got an advert running on that, a Facebook advert running on that, that’s costing me, I’ve put four pounds on it, so that’s about five dollars, five dollars a day, at the moment , the last week’s had 15, sorry, the last seven days I’ve had 15 leads on it, so that’s 15 leads who have gone, left me their email address and name, and have gone to the page where they, they can download the free seven day challenge, which contains a, contains obviously a link to a, the website, which, which is another, basically another sales funnel, which goes through another course, and an upsell in there as well, so there’s a, also an immediate upsell.  When the, seven day, challenge lead magnet goes out, there’s an upsell, going with that,  on the delivery page that goes with that, there’s an immediate upsell there that asks people to go to the, to go to website try and get the paid offer there and then.

it needs a little bit of tinkering with I think, and maybe I need to improve some of the offer to make it, you know, an incredible, an incredible free gift to, to want them to stay there and actually take out some money right at the very start. The, I think the holy grail of Facebook advertising would be to have self, self-funding adverts, which are possible, they are possible, I know people who are, who are getting them, so it is possible and I’m sure I’ll get there, keep trying and, and trying different things basically.

So yeah, that’s, I think one, I think Thursday last week actually it had, it got six, six, no, five leads in one day, yeah, so that, that day the leads were costing less than a, less than a dollar each or around a dollar each, so yeah, I’m quite pleased with the way it started.

It’s been, the advert would have been running two weeks, 14 days this Wednesday, so that’s the time I’ll be looking at the advert and sort of tweaking things because it’s, it’s had time in the, in the Facebook learning phases to, for Facebook to, to sort out who it’s going to etc. There’s various variables in there that I can change for things that are not working, so I’m not looking at that until Wednesday,

So this week, I’ve taken this week as, the three M’s week, so that’s Moores Mega Monetisation, so each day this week I’m going to put a link somewhere that will have the ability to make me, make me commission somewhere down the line,

Okay, so thanks for watching and yeah, see you next week.