Welcome to More Cheese Less Whiskers Podcast. My name is Dean Jackson and this week I'm very excited. I just had an amazing conversation with my friend Nicholas Kusmich.

Now Nicholas is a bonafide Facebook expert. I mean he's at the top of the game. We spent a very long time on the phone. Normally, when we do a More Cheese Less Whiskers episode, it's with the intention of hatching evil schemes for the guest. We did a little bit of that, but very cleverly what I was able to do is turn it into an almost two-hour consultation for me to hatch some evil schemes for how I could get all the knowledge that Nicholas has about running Facebook ads, taking his knowledge and applying it to the Email Mastery program that I'm currently running a case study group with, but with a view to opening that up to everybody in the New Year and Facebook is a big pillar of that.

I got some incredible advice, some incredible insight and I had an amazing time talking with Nicholas here. You'll see we had some little surprises at the end too.

I think we created a really great resource for you if you're at all curious about running Facebook ads and how that could apply to your business. Enjoy this episode. Grab a cup of coffee first because you're going to need to be fully caffeinated. That's a little bit of a long one.

Links:

The 90-Minute Book
Email Mastery Book
Nicholas's Book (created from this episode - coming soon)

NicholasKusmich.com
2-day Facebook Intensive
Facebook Marketing Mastery Facebook Group

 

 

Want to be a guest on the show?  Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch.

Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk about here on More Cheese, Less Whiskers...

 

Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 020

Dean: Nicholas Kusmich I presume.

Nicholas: Hello Dean, how are you?

Dean: I'm good how are you?

Nicholas: Very good thanks.

Dean: Well, I'm excited to hatch some evil schemes today.

Nicholas: I love hacking evil schemes.

Dean: Well, we're recording right now, we've got the whole hour to ourselves to hatch whatever evil schemes we can come up with.

Nicholas: All right.

Dean: Why don't you set the context? Kind of tell what you do and where we're going to focus today.

Nicholas: Yeah, well I mean in short, we have been spending, oh gosh, I don't even know how many years now, since Facebook released their ads platform in Beta. Which was several years ago now. We've been literally spending all of that time figuring out a couple of things. We've been figuring out how social behavior works, how people on this particular type of platform like to respond to certain types of messages. How do we direct response marketing on a platform that is not necessarily direct response, but it's much more socially driven. How do we do that? Fortunately, I think the universe is kind of aligned in our favor and we've managed to get some incredible ROIs and worked with some incredible thought leaders that represent some mega industries on the planet today. That's really what we've been focusing on and working on. Really just making the advertising platform on Facebook be user friendly for the entrepreneur and the business owner and really figuring out how to make that work for them.

Dean: Mm-hmm . Where do you think the big opportunity kind of things would you like to focus on?

Nicholas: Well, you know we could focus on a couple things Dean. Depending on where people where people are really at with stuff. I think for those who are not yet on the platform it's really identifying the opportunity that lies before us there. For those who are on the platform and just trying to struggle with how to make it work, I think there's some things that we can talk about there. Then for those who are really making it work, how do you scale without compromising your ROI, that's another thing that we could potentially discuss. I'm comfortable going in any one of those directions.

Dean: Cool, well let's make it useful for you. What would be the thing that you would like to focus on? What would be the thing that would be most helpful for you here? If we were to look at applying the 8 profit activators to what you're doing, where would you say would be the big opportunity.

Nicholas: At that end of the day, the opportunity for me anyways is getting people aware of what the potential is and what they're doing. From that potentially have them come out to one of our intenses where we could do a lot of that heavy lifting for them.

Dean: Okay.

Nicholas: For me, that will revolve around my 3C type customer journey process which I mean the 3Cs stand for click, capture, and convert. It's essentially kind of three stage up front, funnel kind of lead generation process. We kind of talk about some of the elements that are involved with that.

Dean: Perfect.

Nicholas: We can talk a little bit about ad formulas that working really well. We can talk a little bit about what makes good lead magnet versus what doesn't. Which is again all part of ... You know the click is all about the ad, the capture's all about the lead magnet and the landing page, and the convert's all about what happens on that thank you page, and some strategies we use there.

Dean: All of that's where the e-mails come in to.

Nicholas: That’s when you can take over.

Dean: Yeah. If you're looking at somebody who's coming into a situation where they've got a great process to help people get a result. Then the front end of this, where Facebook advertising would fall into it is what I would call the profit activator two and three. Where we get somebody to raise their hand and then we get to start a dialog with them.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That's really where you've spent the majority of your time is really figuring out that front end of the funnel. Getting somebody in contact with people, like generating new leads.

Nicholas: Potential, yeah, the front end, top of the funnel lead generation side of things.

Dean: Right, okay, well then lets do this then. Maybe what we can do is we can turn the tables and we can do this for, let's use me as an example then.

Nicholas: Okay.

Dean: If we're saying, if I look at a situation like my E-Mail Mastery program.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: I've just launched new case study group. I've been doing this for a couple of years now. Started out doing full page ads in Success magazine, driving people to a landing page where they could download the E-Mail Mastery book. Then I've got a great e-mail engagement sequence that will get people that want to work with me on improving their e-mail sales process, into my E-Mail Mastery case study program. Work with them and document everything and use it as a case study for other people. To see how applying my methods can work.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Where we basically pick up with that is from the moment somebody ops in. I was using the full page ads in Success as the lead in to that. We were getting about a 68% opt in on the page, for the landing page. Now if I wanted to take and I've done some limited Facebook advertising on that. How would your process guide me in what's possible there? What would be the thing that would ... Maybe set some context for what I could expect to pay for opt ins or however you would measure it with your experience.

Nicholas: Sure in this particular case, we'd be looking at exactly what you have here and then what I would do to approach it to transition that to Facebook essentially.

Dean: Mm-hmm  right.

Nicholas: Fantastic. What I would do essentially is first we'd do a quick analysis of the assets you have. Obviously you have your E-Mail Mastery book that you're being offered. What I might actually suggest is to take a look at the book and I have a copy of it. I would take a look at the book and see if there are elements that we might be able to pull out to make even a shorter version of it or to make a stand alone some type of a downloadable PDF type thing. What we've noticed generally on Facebook is the reality that it's a noisy marketplace. Unlike some of the other platforms out there, it is a noisy marketplace. A lot of people are promising the same sort of things to the industry or to the market in general. What we're finding is working of all the types of "lead magnets" that can be offered typically and there's two reason for this, but typically something that can come in the form of a one to three page downloadable PDF that has some very actionable insights and nuggets that could be applied.

Have the highest desire and the lowest lead cost up front and I think that has to do with very low resistance, I mean everyone likes something that's actionable. Everybody likes something that doesn't require too much time and or money. I believe we have two currencies we transact with. One being money and one being time. If we ask ... You know the old saying Dean that says, "There's no harm in asking".

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: I believe in today's social media world that there is in fact harm in asking and if you ask for too much up front. That it actually can do a detriment to your business in general but even specifically to someone's first impression of you. A general formula that we like to use when we're talking about lead magnets is SAGE. Essentially anyone who has any form of asset that they can offer in exchange for an e-mail, we say try to have it follow the SAGE principle or the SAGE formula. S stands for short, we like to say that your first encounter with someone in a cold market should allow them to consume that content in about four to seven minutes. Anything too much longer than that, offers issues of incompleteness.

Dean: Sure.

Nicholas: Even if you can get a good lead for a good cost for let's say a 55 minute video or even an e-book that will take some time to read. I would say that even if you could get a good cost lead for that, the detriment to that is if someone does in fact opt-in for it, but doesn't complete the content that you're giving them. You're almost psychologically training them to say, "Hey, I'm going to give you content and it's okay for you not to complete it".

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: That's kind of the worst thing because if later on we get them on some sort of a webinar or we put a sales page in front of them or something like that. If they have this thing in the back of their mind psychologically telling them, "Well, the last time they gave me content I didn't finish it, so it's okay to do that this time." That's probably not the best place that we want them to be.

Dean: Right.

Nicholas: As a general rule of thumb we like to say that the S stands for short, four to seven minute consumption time. Just because people's attention spans especially on social media unlike other platforms is very short. In fact Dean, I have this little post-it note right beside my work computer that says, "Nick, you're already out of time." Just to remind me that I have split seconds to try and capture attention and to get someone to take some sort of an action. Again, S stands for short.

A in SAGE stands for action oriented or actionable. I think due to the past, back in the day, everything was about information. It was just give out some great information and then it will attract the right flock to you. I think today that has changed slightly, where information is a commodity. Within everyone's pocket and their cell phone, you can find out just about any information you need to about anything, thanks to tools like the Googles. What we like to say is rather than just offering information, we like to say offer something that's insightful. To me the only different between information and an insight is information is just that. Whereas insight is what you can do with particular pieces of information in order to get a desired result. The last thing we want to do is be presented in our marketplace as people who just have really good content. I want to be known in my marketplace as someone who has actionable content, that actually gets me results when I apply that content.

Dean: Yes.

Nicholas: When we're thinking of the A here, again actionable. We just want to say how can we take the content that I already have and repurpose it in such a way where someone can take an immediate action and get an immediate result.

Dean: Yeah and that's what was really ... I'm completely in alignment with that and that was the whole approach of teaching people the nine word e-mail.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Very simple concept. That was what the full page ad was essentially an article about that, that taught somebody in that one article everything they would need to know to take action and send a 9 word e-mail.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: My approach to that was just that, that I took the approach of, what would it take for me to make that page the most valuable page in the magazine, right?

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Like taking it from a adding value, getting somebody to take action, but even in taking that action, it created a sense of I want more. Because they're going to say, I told them the whole thing but then there might be a thing of well what do I put in the subject line? What do I do when people respond? The whole lead in was to download the book where I would give them the-

Nicholas: Whole thing.

Dean: Yeah, the whole thing. That was really a powerful thing. My thought and I've had some success in using that article as kind of a duplicating that in a Facebook environment.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: To give somebody that first taste of a result. Then get them to leave their name and their e-mail address to get the book. Sorry to interrupt on that, what's the G?

Nicholas: No, so actually that's almost like you read my mind. Because that's a perfect segue to the G. The G stands for kind of goal oriented. What I mean by that is every prospect is on some sort of a journey. They are where they are and they are trying to get to where they want to be. If I see it as kind of a linear path someone is at point A, and they're trying to get point Z and there's obviously all these steps in between. Now, what I would like to say about that is a lot of people in their magnet or in some of their initial content, attempt to get someone from A to Z in that one piece of content.

Dean: Yes.

Nicholas: The reality is A, it often causes overwhelm, so the person never gets to do anything. I would say from the goal oriented standpoint we are looking to get someone from point A to point B, not to point D or F or G or anywhere down the road. It exactly speaks to what you spoke to here. In the sense where if you can take someone just one step closer to their desired goal, a couple of beautiful things happen. Number one just like you said, whenever you help someone get a little bit closer, they're asking, "Okay, what's next?" How do I take that next step with you? You've helped me with step one, I want to take step 2, but another beautiful psychological thing that happens is these people usually and there's few exceptions to this rule. Anyone who's looking for a solution to something as typically, you're not the first person they've come to. They've explored solutions in many other places and the reality that they're continuing to look it means because they haven't made any progress.

In this case, if you've actually allowed them to make that one step of progress even closer, A this could be the first time, they've every actually made any progress or at least have the perception of progress. Then B, what that does to them is say, "Well, not only have I made progress, but I am now associating that progress with Dean." He's the only guy who's actually let me get a little bit closer to this. Now their association or their perception of you as the person that helped them get that progress, you're being seen in a great light and you're being seen as the authority. You're being seen as someone who's credible because they probably again, never made that progress in their past. Now they are and they're associating that progress with you.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Like I said-

Dean: I saw that all the time. What would happen is people would ... Because in my follow up process, I would ask people in the second engaging kind of e-mail with them, have they tried a nine word e-mail yet? They would tell me, "Wow, I've been e-mailing with these people for ever and not gotten any response." I sent the nine word e-mail and immediately they responded. They're amazed that it's a magic trick that I can show them.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: They're immediately now paying attention and want to know where do we go from there?

Nicholas: Probably much more apt to show up whatever you offer next. If that was a case study, teleseminar training, or anything like that, the resistance is probably completely being blown out of the water now. Now they're looking for that next opportunity to engage with you on some level.

Dean: Yes. I look at one of the things that you said, this completely aligns with my separation of profit activator two, which is compel people to raise their hands and profit activator three, which is to educate and motivate.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: I talk about that as separating the compelling from the convincing. All I want to do initially to get somebody to raise their hand is essentially returning and invisible prospect into a visible prospect. That's the hard line that I'm drawing. That's kind of where I like your idea of click, capture, convert. The capture is really about compelling, because that's an impulsive thing, people say, "Oh, I want that".

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Now because they asked for that, now you have the opportunity to convince them which is part of that conversion process.

Nicholas: Yeah, I like that so much. You know when I was thinking about it Dean, also that kind of eludes to what you're talking about here. I found that there are three major reasons why someone will not transact with us. I'm sure there's more, but these are the three reasons that I've found. One is because they don't trust us. That can often times be solved with good copy and proper social proof and all that other stuff. The second thing and this is what it relates to, what we're talking about here is they don't trust themselves to actually follow through on the action that you presented for them. If that's the case, then there's no greater way to help them build confidence in themselves by actually giving them that bite size thing that allows them to take that one step forward. Because then they actually make that process and now their like, "Well, I think I can actually do this". Whereas maybe they didn't earlier.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: I love your nine word e-mail example because probably they've been sending e-mail, after e-mail, after e-mail. They're like, "Oh no, Dean's going to give me some complicated e-mail strategy, I don't know if I can do it all". Then you surprise them and say, "Hey just send these nine words out and see what happens". They send the nine words out and then they get a response. They're like, "Geez, well this can actually work" and their confidence is taken to a whole other level.

Dean: Yeah, as soon as that happens, that's exactly it, their pupils dilate, they get to squirt the dopamine, they're "wait somebody replied". That's like this burst of positive energy and now they're like there's something to this. What were the three? No trust, don't trust themselves, and then what was the third?

Nicholas: Yeah, so they don't trust you, they don't trust themselves, and the third thing that we've found is that they feel like they have time to make a decision. I don't know about you Dean but there's so many times where I saw something and I'm like, I really need to get that. I'll open it up on the new tab in Chrome and say, "I'll get back to that sometime." Then of course, we never get back to it, it gets lost in the ethers and so I think this might be outside the realm of this conversation but if there are things that we can do to ethically remove that time barrier and put a bit of a time constraint on it. I think that would be helpful.

Dean: Yeah, my thing has been and I'm right on track with you about the short things in that I've created a whole company around creating the 90 minute book. Which is a very simple thing, that's short, easy to consume, but there's still something very valuable perception wise about a book. People also get the chance to ... As opposed to a video, like if you're using video as an opt. Opt in now to watch my 55 minute video or to watch this training program or come to my webinar or whatever it is. The price of admission for that is that it's just like your saying, they can delay that because I don't have time to watch a video right now, but you get to if it's a book that they can gather, right? This is the whole thing that they can gather the ... I can take action and get this book even if I'm not intending to read it right now. I've reached my goal of capture. I'm not so concerned that you read the book right now. I know that if I've got you to ask for it, in my mind that's 80% of the job of the book.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: Is just to get you to raise your hand. Now I'm patient enough to know that I can convert over a longer period of time now. Because I've got so much opportunity to connect with you. I want to go back and kind of ... I think I've missed some of the SAGE. We've got nested loops here. It's what happens when you've got creative people going off on tangents here. We've got short, actionable, what was the G?

Nicholas: The goal oriented.

Dean: Goal oriented okay. That's where I look at your whole method here of click, capture, convert, is really ... You could have the greatest conversion sequence in the world, but if you don't have somebody clicking on the ad that gets them to your landing page where you have the opportunity to get them to leave their name and e-mail. Nothing's going to happen. I often see that people try and do too much future pacing. They try, like you said, take somebody from A to Z when really the only thing purpose of the ad in my mind is to get somebody to click on and go to the landing page. The only purpose of the landing page is to get them to leave their name and their e-mail address.

Nicholas: In other words to capture the lead, I think you bring up a good point here that a lot of people maybe oversee, is that each part of the sequence ultimately has it's primary purpose and you shouldn't be looking at trying to ... I see this happen all the time. I see people writing Facebook ads trying to sell the thing at the end of the line.

Dean: I get it.

Nicholas: There's so many steps in between. Again, I believe the same sort of thing. The point of the ad is to get the click. The point of the landing page is to capture the lead and the point of your follow up sequence obviously is to convert prospect into client and or customer. If you'd just realize that each of those things do in fact have their purpose and you stay within the realm of that purpose. You're probably going to do way better off than trying to jump the gun and go too far ahead.

Dean: Yeah. Okay. Have I missed the E? Are we now leading into the E?

Nicholas: Well, yeah, which it kind of is the perfect summary, so the E in fact is easy. I think there's this and you're a master at this. I think there's so many people who you know especially in the Internet world have come up with this idea that the more complicated I can make something the smarter I appear to be. The more I can charge them for fixing up some of this complications in their life. When I found the opposite to be true and I think you're a living example of this with the nine word e-mail or the 90 minute book. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your offer and the implementation of the content can literally be understood and executed by a five year old. I mean that's a bit of an exaggeration.

Dean: I get it.

Nicholas: We just don't want to be the people who are making things over complicated because again that gets in the way. If someone feels like it's complicated, paralysis of analysis kicks in. They're thinking, "There's no way I can do this", so they abandon the process all together. Whereas if they see it and it's like, "Oh, well I could send out a nine word e-mail" or "I could get on an interview and do a 90 minute book". All of a sudden, I mean there's obviously a whole bunch of psychological benefits going on but that definitely often helps that process.

Dean: There's part of the thing is that's always been my strategy is to kind of lead by example. Like I use 90 minute books for myself.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That's really the way that I go about it. I use the nine word e-mails myself. That's kind of my mode of operating here. I'm evidencing that it actually works. I've used for the 90 minute book, we've had great success with Facebook. Using the 90 minute book offer of download the 90 minute book. Which is a book that is the exact personification of it because I use the lead process-

Nicholas: It is a 90 minute book.

Dean: It is. I always joke if your a Seinfeld fan, it's like Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That's essentially what it is. One of the most successful Facebook campaigns that I've used for that, is to run Facebook ads against some of my friends audiences. When we first developed this, I would run 90 minute book offers against Brendan Burchard's. People who like Brendan Burchard. This was at the time, Brendan didn't have as big ... He's really blown up now. The whole personal development thing. At the time his main thing was the Millionaire Messenger. That's a perfect match for people who have a message that they want to get out into the world. I would run the Facebook ads and get people to come to the landing page, very simple and that's one thing that I've found is it's the simpler the landing page, the better. Removed everything from it, except get the book you know.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: Then when people would opt in, then I would send them an e-mail that would debrief for them, what happened with the Facebook campaign. I run the ads and I did it because again thinking about what the end result is. I wanted to think about how people could use this for themselves. That they could see themselves doing it themselves, right?

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: I'd get to a point where I would like to and get to spend as much money as I can every day to get people to opt in. I know that most people who are thinking about getting started with this would say, "Well of course you can do that." If you could spend a $1,000 a day or $2,000 a day on ads, that's the thing, but I wanted it to fit for them. What they could see themselves doing. The campaign that I would run would spend a $150 a day and do it from Friday to Sunday and then on Tuesday morning, I would send them a message that said Facebook campaign results inside.

Nicholas: Yeah.

Dean: I would say, "Hey Nick, just thought you might like to see what happened with the Facebook campaign I was running this weekend." I broke it all down, here's what happened, I ran these new seed ads to people who like me or Brendon Burchard and if you know me, I like things simple. If you know Brendan, he's all about packaging your message. Just say, here's what happened, we got this many clicks and I got 340 people left their name and their e-mail address. We break it all down for, we got 60% of the people who came to the page, left their name and their e-mail. It cost, I think it was a $1.80 or something for the opt ins. You're breaking that down, showing how that all worked out and knowing that that's going to fuel their desire or their confirmation that wow if I had a 90 minute book, I could do that same thing.

Nicholas: Right. I think that's so beautiful. I think in media they call that medipop or the idea of almost unveiling the curtain and letting people see what's actually going on.

Dean: That's what it was. Yes. Absolutely. Then in the p.s. of that, we would just say, "If you'd like us to help you write a book, here's how it works" and explain the whole process. How we do what they have to do and then all the things that we do for them. They just have to ... We do a brainstorm call, get the title and the outline, then we record and interview with them and then their done. We take over from there. We get it transcribed. We edit it, we create the cover, we lay it out in the book. We get it up on CreateSpace. We set up a landing page, we do the whole thing for them. It's $1,800 and the whole thing is done. If you'd like us to help you write a book, just reply to this message and say, "I want to write a book". Every time we would send out that message, we'd get people respond back and say, "I want to write a book". Then that would just start the whole process of Congratulations, what's your book going to be about? You know, it's just so elegantly simple that way, you know?

Nicholas: How'd you come up with that Dean, because most people in our space would be like, okay, well let's get a lead magnet out there, let them download the lead magnet, and let's just start selling right away. Obviously you're a brilliant marketing mind but what was the process-

Dean: Obviously.

Nicholas: Obviously. What actually, did you intentionally think about that when you started? What got you to that point of thinking, "Okay, well I can either try to sell the benefits of a 90 minute book" or I can actually show someone the campaign that I just did.

Dean: Demonstrate it.

Nicholas: Yeah. What caused that decision or that choice to do it that way?

Dean: Well, I think part of it is that I always begin with the end in mind. I know what point Z is, but I call it thinking like a Chess master, I start to think what would be ... You know you've got your click, capture, convert, well my three Cs for our e-mail mastering program are compel, convince, collaborate.

Nicholas: That's good.

Dean: When I look at it, if I can compel somebody to raise their hand, which is curiosity driven type of thing. Like, oh I want that, what's that about? That's where a book title, like Frank Kern right now is all over the Internet with his 90 minute book about how to get High Paying Clients, even if nobody knows who you are. That model, the title is so compelling that I have people say, "I want to know how to do that". If you just strip away everything else and just get the people who want that, while they're in that trance of oh I want that. That compelling is like a compulsion. It's a thing that is where we're magnetized and drawn to under our own momentum to get good things, right? It's like the mouse with the cheese. They're compelled to seek out cheese and there's nothing societally more bonafide than a book as an authority, as a value piece. As the something that's conveniently packaged, easy to consume. Maybe if you have a book title that is compelling to your audience, that's always where I start. What would be the title of the book that the person that I want to be in a conversation with would definitely want to have.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: We've done things like that with doing, with the adult acne cure, looking for people who have adult acne. Use that as an example and the 90 minute book is another example of that, right? Wow, how do you write a book in 90 minutes? I start out with that and then the convincing part is before I ever get to the point of presenting and offer or offering to collaborate with somebody. That's more of the way I look at it. I like to fuel their own goal and their own desire and then present an opportunity for us to work together to get that goal. I can collaborate with you on that. I don't make a point of I'm going to sell you this. It's like I'm just fueling your own desire. I thought through what would be the list of mindsets or beliefs that a person would have to have before they're convinced that a 90 minute book is the thing to do and that they should do it right away. If they believed that they could do it easily, just like you say, they don't believe ... It's one of the things, no trust.

Nicholas: Don't trust themselves now.

Dean: If they don't trust themselves to do it. That they maybe have thought about writing a book but they haven't taken action on it.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: It feels like they have time. If I can show them, convince them that they could do it in 90 minutes, that would be like the baseline. Then, if they believed that once they had this book ... See, I'm already convincing, I'm already building the belief that if they had the book, they could run a Facebook ad.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: They could get people to opt in. They could then offer people their service. See, right now they've got their service, they've got their coaching. They've got their consulting, their product, whatever it is. They've got these people that they want to serve but they don't have a bridge to connect them to. If I show them that the most compelling tool that they can have in this capture mode of yours is a book. Then they are already building their own desire and their own belief to take action on that. When I offer to collaborate with them. They're driving it. It's not me selling them on doing it, you know?

Nicholas: That's so good, so in this process you're actually just seeing ... I love how you reverse engineer that where their ultimate goal is not actually to write a book. Their ultimate goal is to sell more of their services and you're just positioning the book as the tool to help them get there.

Dean: That's exactly what it is. I talk about the dream. About how they're going to use it. The promise, the result that they're going to get right?

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That's what I'm always focused on. That's where that came and if I show them how they can turn ... Because I remember I said, "I don't believe that everybody thinks that they could spend a $1,000 a day on Facebook ads", but they could see themselves spending a $150 a day.

Nicholas: Sure, right.

Dean: If they just did it over a weekend, they'd be willing to spend $300 or $400 on something. When I show them how many leads I got for that amount of money, that's like insider information, that they don't have access to. They may think that it costs a lot of money to get leads, you know?

Nicholas: Yeah, I love that. This is what we discussed as well on our end. It's just every step of that marketing process is doing two things simultaneously, is one getting the click, capturing the lead and converting them but simultaneously it's also like working through objections, it's working on their psychology. It's giving them greater belief and aspiration to move towards their things. I love that parallel that you're talking about there.

Dean: Yeah. Give me some thoughts about how you would approach the E-Mail Mastery here. I'm going to be rolling that out as an ever green thing. Right now I've got a case study group going through right now that we started a couple of weeks ago. I've got a great sequence that if I can get somebody to download the E-Mail Mastery book, I've got an incredible process for engaging with those people and introducing the opportunity to collaborate by working together.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: If I could crack the code on how to get through Facebook, people to come and download the book. That'd be a big scalable win. How would you think through that process?

Nicholas: That's a great question.

Dean: Facebook it's constantly changing and the things that are working now, you know just your ability to reach different people. How would you approach that?

Nicholas: Yeah, it's an excellent question. I think our 3C process is we can delve deeper in to each of those things just to kind of lay it out. You already have the asset or the lead magnet that we'd be offering. That's E-mail Mastery, which I think is fantastic. Now that we understand that we have this asset that is solving a very specific persons problem. I think the next question and I'm speaking maybe partially to the beginner here. The next question here is if I do in fact have this asset, who are the people that it's going to most help?

Dean: Yes.

Nicholas: I like to see it from a perspective, I call it ponds, lakes, and oceans. You know most people you ask the question, you want to be a big fish in a small pond or small fish in a big pond, and the uneducated answer is a small fish in a big pond because then I never run out of potential people I could reach. Not realizing it's going to be swiped away. The educated answer for some people are just I want to be the big fish in the small pond. We like to think about I have this asset, the next question is, who is this most likely to serve in the easiest way? What is my lowest hanging fruit? In other words, who is the pond? We can do that one of a couple of ways. I mean Vilfredo Pareto, a beautiful name by the way, right?

Dean: Yeah, I love it.

Nicholas: Italian economist, back in the 1800s came out with what we now know as the Pareto principle and it's commonly understood as the 80/20 rule. Everyone's heard about it in many different way. I think it also applies to markets. When we're thinking about a market, we could serve everybody for sure. How do we bring that down and say first who's the 20% that we're serving? I want to take it a step further, because I think in today's social media world that even the 20% might still be a red ocean. In context of the red ocean, blue ocean strategy. I still think the 20% is in fact a red ocean. I would take it a step further and say who is the 20% of the 20%? What is the 96/4 rule? Who are your 4% that would make up your pond? Now it's not meaning that you're going to be staying in the pond forever. It just means let's go after the lowest hanging fruit first, so you can get few quick wins. You could test how well your process works, etc, etc.

We want to look at that, who are the 4%. I call it the targeting trifecta. I say A, who are they following. Just like in your case, I believe on the Internet, every industry has tribes and if there are tribes, there are in fact tribal leaders. Rather than spending all this time trying to build your own tribe and spending all the money, and effort, and resources, well why don't you identify tribal leaders? See if their audiences are in fact people that would be interested in what you had to offer. You give a great example of that. Where when Brendan Burchard was really leading with his Millionaire Messenger concept, he had spent ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and money to build a tribe.

Dean: Because I was running in Success magazine, he's running in Success magazine with the same thing, the Millionaire Messenger. It's a great audience, yeah.

Nicholas: It is a great audience and you've identified like their are tribes, people who have a message, who want to get it out to the world. There's a tribal leader at that time, who was Brendan, who had spent this time and money to build the tribe, so you can easily go after his audience on Facebook and say, "Well these would be people who make up my pond." Low hanging fruit, people who already understand the game here.

Dean: Just as an aside, I shared that with Brendan and he's like, "So let me get this straight, wait a second, so you're running ads against my audience, selling them stuff on how to be authors?" I said, "Yeah, that's right". He goes, "That's brilliant". It's so funny.

Nicholas: Between the two of us and I haven't told Brendan this myself, but between the two of us I love when he gets up on stage and says, "If you're not spending a $1,000 a day building your audience and advertising on Facebook, you have entered into the new millennium of digital advertising" and in my workshops even laugh and I say, "Okay, if you're not quite there yet business owner, let Brendan spend that money and then you just kind of" ...

Dean: I love it.

Nicholas: I think they'd be that little fish that tags along underneath the shark and you don't have to do all the heavy lifting. You can let them do it first.

Dean: Yeah, we were all for that open source list building is what Facebook likes are. Yeah, exactly.

Nicholas: The first part of the targeting trifecta is in fact who do they follow? The second part of the targeting trifecta is what do they frequent? That's the second F. If we follow, then the second one is frequent, you know what sites are they visiting regularly? What publications are they frequenting? I mean it's easy for me to know that if someone is an avid reader of success magazine, that they're obviously interested in ... They're an entrepreneur and they're looking to do things that will obviously help them become more successful. If I know that a particular person is reading the Wall Street Journal everyday, that would tell me certain things about them because of the sites that they are frequenting. Once I had as most exhaustive of a list as possible of people who are tribal leaders. People that you know my ideal customer and client is following. My next list that I'm trying to build on this three column list here is what do they frequent? What publications are they reading? What sites to they go to often? Where are they going even in the offline world? Are they shopping at particular stores? What is it that they're frequenting. That will give me a nice hefty list of people that I could potentially target as well.

Thirdly, part of the targeting trifecta. If we have who do they follow, what do they frequent, the last thing is what do they fund? In other words where are they actually spending money? If I know that someone is let's say spending money, or they're shopping at Whole Foods. That would tell me that they're obviously kind of taking care of their health. They have a little bit of discretionary income because Whole Foods, some people call it Whole Check. I mean they have the same things somewhere else, we're also going to spend it more there. It tells me a whole lot about them. Because if I know this is actually where they're spending money, this is where they are funding. The whole category of people that I could reach as well. I think the sweet spot is in the middle.

If you know this is your pond now, if you know who are they following, what are they frequenting and what are they funding, right in the middle of that diagram is my 4%. It's my 20% of the lowest hanging fruit of people that I could reach. In your case, talking about E-mail Mastery, we'd go through that little bit of an exercise and find out who makes up the 4%. That would be our initial targets that we would go after when we're running ads.

Dean: Yes. Got you.

Nicholas: Does that make sense Dean?

Dean: Yeah and it's like this whole process is very like with profit activator number 1, is select a single target market at a time.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That's the thing, it's like you're not narrowing it down always and for some I would add to that geography. I have to encourage people to put some artificial constraints on themselves. I hadn't thought about it as a pond, a lake, or an ocean. If you can help everybody everywhere, that's very broad. If you narrow yourself to just Orlando, or Toronto, or whatever as a starting point here, that narrows it down as well. You can really ramp up the intensity of it.

I heard a great thing about radio advertising. The choice the people have to make often is reach or frequency and the approach I heard is ... The question you have to ask is do you want to convince a 100% of the people 10% of the way or would you like to convince 10% of the people a 100% of the way?

Nicholas: That's a good-

Dean: That fits in with what you're saying about the pond. Is by narrowing it down to your ideal, like if we say, what's the result that you're able to create for people and if you were taking the approach of what would you do if you only got paid if they get the results. You take that approach, then you stack the deck in your favor, and you say, "If I'm only going to get paid if they get the result, then who's the best person that I could get that result for? What would have to be true about them to get that result? If I say that for me, for E-mail Mastery. The person would either be somebody who has got a big list of people that they are currently e-mailing or they've built up this list of people. Because that's a big opportunity there or they've got a current influx of people that they're currently adding to the list.

I always like to say the big opportunity where E-mail Mastery picks up is with people who you've already got a list or you've already figured out how to get people to join your list every day. Those are the ones that ... That's where I immediately start.

 

Nicholas: Yeah and I love that. I think also Facebook with just a little bit of thinking through these exercises that we're talking about here Dean, it's very easy to start identifying who they follow, where they frequent and what they fund. I know if we're talking about people with e-mail lists, there's a whole ton of auto-responder services who have followers on Facebook.

Dean: Exactly.

Nicholas: I love how you're saying that. It's just really when you can identify that 4%. Again, beautiful concept, I know you've come up with it. Who would you be going after if you only did in fact get paid after you generated a result for them. Who are those people? That's a great starting point for everybody to realize, okay if those are the people how do I find them on Facebook? They're very easily findable as long as you just know a couple of things that you can do on the targeting side of things.

Dean: Mm-hmm . What's the lakes and the oceans? Are you just using that as the comparison of the size?

Nicholas: No, absolutely. The ponds are the lowest hanging fruit, these are the people who we want to go after first. Now, the good part about that is, again they are in fact the lowest hanging fruit, so we would see the highest conversion rates and the highest results. These are people who are going to be the most forgiving with a bad funnel. Because they just need the result. The downfall to that though is that those ponds aren't necessarily scalable should we want to start going big down the road. That's where we start going into lakes.

To me the easiest way to understand lakes and there's many areas we can talk about for lakes, but to me especially when we're talking about Facebook. I would say, let's say you got a 1,000 customers. A 1,000 people who have decided to trade some sort of currency in exchange for what it is that you have to offer. That makes up a decent pool where now you can go to Facebook and say well, "Facebook, I have all this demographic data about a 1,000 people who spent money with me". Can you help me out and go into the Facebook world and identify people who are just like these people?

Facebook calls that a look-a-like audience. I like to say you need at least a 1,000 people in a particular bucket to make that look-a-like audience more effective. That would be one way that we would identify who a lake is. Now that we have all of these customers and we want to reach even more customers but we're running out of the specific interest groups that we're going after. We can go to Facebook and say, "Hey, create a look-a-like audience an audience that looks a lot like these people in this pool here. Facebook of course, because they have all of this demographic data on everybody who uses their platform. That does a pretty good job of identifying who those people are. Now our smaller ponds have turned into bigger lakes. It's a easy shift into that lake because we already have all this demographic data on people that we're going after. We start to create these look alike audiences that we can reach through our targeting that way.

Dean: Let me ask you something clarifying them. Is part of the thing about the ponds not only the specificity of who it is but the size, what would be like the context for the size of audience that you would like to seed a start with? Typically people ... that was in the beginning when I was doing the things with 90 minute book, you can be sloppy in a way that I was just saying, "Just people who like Brendon Burchard or people who like Frank or Eben or any of the guys that I've had exposure already to their audience". There's likely that they know who I am. They know there's some context for me there. Not really narrowing it down. I know that when most people approach this they think that I want to go against ... I'll take all of these, start key word kind of loading, right?

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: They say, "Good, I've got a million people in this audience that I can reach here with this". What is the guide post that you would use for the audience size for a pond?

Nicholas: Yeah, that's a great question and one of the way I answer that is the actual size is not as important as much as the relevancy. Because if you go after Brendon's audience and he's like up to four million fans now or something crazy like that. That could still be a pond because of the relevancy.

Dean: Okay.

Nicholas: We're really looking at like lowest hanging fruit. On the flip side. I mean I know I've gone into very, very targeted markets let's say personal trainers in rural UK. That audience was maybe like 3,000 people and some people would say, "Well, that's a waste of time and money with Facebook ads". Well actually we were able to pull high ticket clients out of a pond of only 3,000. We can go as low as 3,000 or as big as let's say Brendon's four million and that would still be in my opinion be considered a pond because of how relevant that audience was.

Dean: If we're saying ... That's encouraging to know when you think about it. For transparency here, I'm thinking through for myself here too. I wouldn't have thought to narrow it as small as 3,000 or 5,000 person pond would be a great place to start.

Nicholas: Sure, I think the only kind of caveat that I would put to that is you know you mentioned some people like key word load. They try to put all these audiences together in one bucket. The only thing I would suggest is when you are targeting in fact these very particular interests and however you're narrowing them down. That you just reserve one interest per asset. What you're doing essentially here, because I've seen a lot of people say let's go after Kern, and Pagan, and Brendon, and Tony, let's lump them all into one file-

Dean: Yeah, I've done that.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: I'm thinking, I'm going to ramp this up and of course, I'm in the situation where I sit in the same room as you sat hearing Brendon say spend a $1,000 a day. I'm like yes, okay let's do it, let's load this up. Let's take Frank, and Evan, and this. Spend me a $1,000 a day I say to my guy.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: It's not that easy.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's crazy and on that side note I'd probably owe Brendon a whole heap of money because I don't know how many people have come to me and said, "Brendon told me I need to spending at least a ...".

Dean: You're the guy that could help me spend it. Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah, but the reason we split them out is simply because let's say you lump them all together and you start running ads against them and you start getting just for really easy numbers, $5 leads. What you won't know is what if Brendon's audience is in fact getting new leads for $1 and Tony's audience is getting you leads for $9 and so they're averaging out at $5. You wouldn't know that if you had them all lumped together. That's why no matter what you're doing you do want to separate them out because that's going to give you greater visibility on which audiences are actually producing leads and or sales at a pace that you're comfortable with. That would be the only caveat that I see a lot of people make a mistake on. They just go for mega big audiences and they'll lump people together. They just won't know who's performing versus who's not.

Dean: Right. What's the realm of what you would like to see for just some of those numbers that you were talking about in terms of the cost per lead to capture?

Nicholas: Cost per lead, yeah.

Dean: What would you say, every situation is different, but I mean certainly what would be some of the highs and lows I guess?

Nicholas: Yeah, no, I think a lot of that is in fact industry specific. If we're just going to make some generalizations let's say, I would like to see lead magnet leads come in between a $1 and $3 that would tell me that we're in a pretty good range.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: If someone was offering a webinar, I would like to see those webinar leads come between $3 and $7. That gives me a nice comfortable range. Different things that people are offering. If someone's offering a straight up strategy session to get someone on the call to try and enroll them in their high tech program. I mean obviously you're going to spend a lot more money for that. I would say this. This is a caveat that our friend Ryan Deiss keeps promoting and we were having a conversation about that a couple weeks ago. The goal for most people is how do I generate the cheapest leads humanly possible? I think the mindset should shift to the point of what is the most I am willing to pay for a lead and still be profitable.

Dean: There's the thing and that just ties into exactly where I look at this from for E-mail Mastery. That if I can help somebody who is getting opt ins for $3 right now, with a lead magnet or getting $7 opt ins for a webinar. I can help them with a 90 minute book get that $7 webinar opt in for $2 for the book opt in and help with the conversational conversion process to convert more of the people that they get opted in. Then ultimately that will allow them to be able to spend more money. Because ultimately you're absolutely right. I was hoping to open that conversation. Really it's a factor, it's all the math. You have to begin with the end in mind. If you're selling a $29 book, then you obviously can't pay $7 for an opt in to get somebody to do that. If you're selling an E-mail Mastery program for $1,500 you can afford to pay a little more, right? If you're saying what would you cheerfully pay for a new client?

Nicholas: Sure. On that note Dean, I think it's important and there are two key questions I like to ask every client that we end up working with or any people that we end up teaching to do this for themselves. This brings perspective to what we're saying here. Question number 1 essentially is what is the 30 day value of a lead to you?

Dean: Right.

Nicholas: Now, I don't like to 90 day or lifetime value, because those numbers get a little blurry over time and it's hard for people to figure that out. If you can be very clear about what a 30 day value of lead is to you, then you're at a great starting point. The second question, the follow up question to that then is what percentage of that value are you willing to spend on acquisition to still be profitable?

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: You should hear the numbers that come out. I mean some people are like, I'm only willing to spend 25% acquisition, some people are 50. Get this, some people Dean say 110%.

Dean: Mm-hmm , yeah I get that, because they know that long term.

Nicholas: Exactly, so the average person would be like why on earth would I spend more to acquire a lead than what that lead is actually worth to me. You just nailed it on the head. When you know your numbers and like you said it is simple math, two things happen. One, you could spend a little more up front, because you know lifetime value, but two, your ability to outspend your competition is what's going to keep you in the game and allow you to mitigate against rising lead costs in general on Facebook. It's going to allow you to mitigate against any potential changes that are happening. It'll allow you to increase margins and mitigate against all that other kind of stuff. I think those are the two questions that anybody who's about to go into a paid media or paid traffic scenario needs to have the answers of. Because if you do know those answers you essentially you bake in the ROI from day one of your campaign.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Because if you know the value of a lead is $5 to you and you can spend up to $5 to still come out on top. That means that for every lead that you get for a $1, you're 4X or 5Xing your return. That's just comfortable feeling to have or when you go into the paid media space, you're not rolling the dice and hoping and praying and thinking I really hope this is going to work out for me. You just know for every dollar you spend, you're going to make that much more back. You can go into with a lot more confidence.

Dean: Mm-hmm , that makes total sense, that's one of the questions I always ask people, is what would you cheerfully pay?

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Because I get people to think about the before unit as a vending machine. The during unit is where they actually deliver the value. We say if the during unit of E-mail Mastery is the delivery of the course and the community that we're serving there, the before unit would be delivery people who want to join that community. They're going to pay $1,500 to take part in that. If you look at the percentage of the initial sale that you would cheerfully pay, if you look at ... There's kind of an established benchmark for that, for most online digital things. Everybody keeps thinking, how can I get JVs and affiliates those things which they'd end up paying 50% right away.

Nicholas: At least.

Dean: At least, you're absolutely right. They would be happy to pay 50 or if it's like a click bank product, they might pay 75% or 80% of the price to get that client. I look at it as once you establish that benchmark if you could do it on your own through paid traffic, though Facebook, through PPC, whatever, that your goal is you could get it for less than that.

Nicholas: Without the headaches.

Dean: Without the headaches, that's exactly right. I wonder, I'm thinking about how do I calculate the 30 day lead value in my situation where I guess you'd have to think about ... That was going to be a factor of the conversion process.

Nicholas: Of course.

Dean: If I said, "If I got a 1,000 opt ins today, right now, if we could push a magic button". Then see how many of those could I convert with an offer to collaborate on their e-mail sales process in the next 30 days, that would set a benchmark for what a bundle of a 1,000 opt ins today is worth.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: I could get to a number, backing into it, would give me how much I could afford to pay.

Nicholas: Correct.

Dean: How would you look at those numbers on something similar to what you know about E-mail Mastery, what would be the conversion numbers you would see typically in a situation like that. I don't want to say typically but what would be in your conservative expectations or something like that?

Nicholas: Yeah and that's a great question. I think a lot has to do obviously with the offer and the guarantees and the price points and all that. It's a lot easier to convert a cheaper product than it is a more expensive product. Then it's also easier to convert something where there's great conversation process in place versus not. In your case, I mean what we just see generally across the board and this is specifically to cold traffic which obviously operates very differently than warm or endorsed traffic. In cold traffic, I think what we're seeing across the board average of what we see is a one percent conversion in the immediacy of your initial funnel is considered average. One to three percent is considered good. Three to five percent is considered great and anything above five percent is considered excellent. I would typically advise someone to stop traffic if their conversion rate was less than a percent to try and figure out what might be going on. In order for them to kind of clean some stuff up that way.

Dean: Mm-hmm . There's the thing, I always look at with this. My approach with direct mail or print, or things like that, I always take the approach of you don't have to spend a lot of money to answer a question that you could answer with less money.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: Do you know what I mean? It's like I know when I'm testing direct mail like post cards. I'll test in groups of just a 1,000 postcards. I'll mail a 1,000 postcards and I know because all I'm looking for, I'm looking for the home run or that it's a loser. You can't hide either one of those in a 1,000. Where it gets gray is if you get a middling result. I would say if it looks okay, you don't know where to go, but I look at you can't bump up a loser with more volume.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: You can't hide-

Nicholas: Although people try.

Dean: You can't hide a winner. You can't hide a home run. If I know that we have a universe of a 100,000 to mail to or more, rather than spend the money to mail 10,000 postcards as a test. I'd rather have 10 shots at figuring out what the big winner is because the variation between one approach versus another is going to point me in the right direction of the winner. Would that approach be something that would work for Facebook as well? Like if I look at thinking through how many people is it going to take me to get 100 opt ins or a 1,000 opt ins and go from there.

Nicholas: What I love about Facebook and what you're talking about is you can mitigate that risk even further.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: With direct mail, let's say you're doing postcards and you've decided to do ten 1,000 piece runs with variations in them to see which one works best and you probably wouldn't do them at the same time either. You'd want to see how they work. The beauty with Facebook is when you spend that money on the 1,000 postcard run, you literally spent it, you've got to wait and see what happens. Let's say accidentally, and I know you wouldn't do this. Let's say accidentally there was a typo there. One was clearly bombing and it just wasn't working. It's not like you can call them back and say, "Hey, hey, hold up on that run, I know you already sent 400 out, for the next 600 give me a refund and let's like figure something". You can't do that.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Whereas on Facebook I mean we could put up an add in a matter of minutes, we could let that ad run and in the matter of hours, no matter what the reason should be, but in the matter of like hours or maybe even one day. Without much risk at all because we can regulate budgets, we can basically look at an ad and say, "Is this working?" Basically our approach is scale or bale, is it working within the number that we're looking at. If the answer is yes, then we scale, if the answer is no, then we bale. There's really no emotion to that whatsoever. The beautiful part is literally we can make decisions within I'd like to say about 24 hours because it takes just about that for Facebook to optimize a particular campaign.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: You could do that all day long and to even preserve your budget a little more, and this is getting a little technical Dean, so forgive me for this.

Dean: No, I love it.

Nicholas: If we have someone who's running ads already they say, "Well, what should my daily bid be for a particular ad set that I'm running". Our general rule of thumb is 4X to 5X your goal cost per lead. If you're goal cost per lead and this is only when you start out, but if your goal cost per lead and this is only when you start out, but if your goal of cost per lead again for the sake of easy numbers is $5. If I can get leads under $5, I'm happy. Then my starting bid for that particular ad set would be between $20 and $25. Between 4X and 5X what my goal cost per lead is. The reason of that is two fold. Number one, it gives Facebook enough room to get more than one lead. I mean if I just set that up at five bucks, the problem with that is if I just get the one lead that's all I get. It's all said and done. You also don't want to put that at a $150 a day because let's say that doesn't work, then you could be overspending on your test.

Dean: Oh, you're saying on the budget, not on each click? You're not saying set your per click budget at $20.

Nicholas: Correct, we're talking about the overall daily budget.

Dean: Daily budget of $20 to $25 right?

Nicholas: Yeah.

Dean: I was saying how do you back into that math if you're paying $20 per click.

Nicholas: Yeah, that probably just wouldn't work no matter what niche you're in.

Dean: I got you, okay.

Nicholas: This way it's a nice way to get started because then you're ... Again, on the one hand you're protecting yourself from overspending. On the other hand you're giving Facebook enough room to get more than one lead to see if this particular ad copy and image going to this particular audience, is in fact going to be a winner or not for you.

Dean: It got you.

Nicholas: Yeah, doing it that way just eliminates most of the risk because you're never going to really overspend and you can pivot as fast as you want to.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Depending on what kind of results you're getting.

Dean: I got you, so it's better to, if you were willing, like a guy like me, I would say to the thing, I want to get to a point where I'm spending a $1,000 a day.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: I'll say, "Okay, I'll set my daily budget at 250 just to test it, I'll run it for" ... I try and compress things I'll say for 24 hours and then I'm trying to do that. You're saying I'm like the guy sending 10,000 post cards when I could get the answer for ... I'm spending $250 when I could get the same answer for $25.

Nicholas: Right and then once you find which one of those ad sets are working, well then by all means increase your ad spend at that point for sure.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Facebook's algorithm is it's a little bit tricky and some of the higher ups that we know at Facebook, even they can't fully explain it to me. What we do know is if you try to spend too hard or too fast, or too much and too fast, you do in fact mess up the algorithm.

Dean: I got you.

Nicholas: What could be a winning campaign for you ends up being a losing campaign and here's how I know this, I've had so many people who were starting and let's say we're spending a $100 or $150 or $250 a day and they're ROIing with very great numbers. Obviously they call me up and they say, "Nick, triple the spend, let's spend $1,000 instead of $250", you know whatever it'd be. Then as soon as anyone who has ever tried to do that, they will notice that their cost per acquisitions go through the roof and they tank.

Dean: Yes, yes.

Nicholas: I sense that, that was a little bit of an experiential yes Dean.

Dean: Yeah, exactly, experienced that.

Nicholas: There is an algorithm that you need to follow in order to scale properly. If you do scale properly, for some of our clients right now, we're spending over a $100,000 a day with no issue.

Dean: That's so great.

Nicholas: You can't go from $20 a day to $100,000 a day obviously that doesn't work.

Dean: Right, not all in one day.

Nicholas: Not in one day, that's right.

Dean: What you're saying to is ultimately the $100,000 a day spend started out by testing with a $25 spend. Is that true?

Nicholas: Exactly. It's a 100% true.

Dean: Okay, I got you. I know we've gone over the hour hear, but we're having some good stuff here, are you okay to keep going for a little bit?

Nicholas: Absolutely.

Dean: Okay, great. We may have ourselves a two part episode here if we keep this up. The numbers, what do you pay attention to in those tests. Like looking at the percentage of click through on the ad. I would say that sometimes I would be guilty of saying, "I really don't care about that, I'm really just focused on what's the percentage on the landing page".

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: It all matters, right?

Nicholas: It does and I think in light of that, there are what would be potentially a little more vanity metric versus what is a value metric. Stuff like click through rate, I think click through rate is a great metric to watch because it tells you how well your audience is responding to your ads. At the same time, that's kind of a key performing metric that we used to either cancel a campaign or let it continue to run, actually doesn't serve us very well. Cost per click is another one of those, so in the world that I live in which is essentially top of funnel lead generation, remember we asked the two initial questions of A, what is the 30 day value of a lead to you, and then B, what percentage of that can you spend on acquisition. If I know those numbers, then really ultimately at the end of the day, my most important metric that I'm watching is in fact, cost per lead.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: When I trace back to that and we trace back that lead all the way through to sale often times. What I notice is the ones that are generating the sales often times are the one that's costing me the most to get the click with.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: If I just stopped and said, "Oh geez, I'm paying a little more than I'm comfortable with" on a cost per click standpoint and I abandon those ads, I would have been leaving sales on the table. I think it's important to track all the way through and obviously return on ad spend is the ultimate metric that we're watching.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: I like to simplify saying my key metric nine times out of ten is the cost per lead. What do I need to do to make that better? Sometimes that's tweaks on the landing page or sometimes that's tweaks in my ad copy or the creative, whatever it'd be. Then secondary to that, yes, I'm watching stuff like frequency. I'm watching stuff like click through rates. I'm watching stuff like cost per clicks but those are not going to be red light, green light factors for me, they're just giving me a broader view of what's actually going on with them.

Dean: Yeah. Those are valuable, I would imagine like my approach, this is how I would think about it. Maybe tell me if I'm off track on this. If I were thinking about it, I don't know what those numbers are right now from Facebook to tell you what the 30 day lead value is for E-mail Mastery. What I know is that I would ... Let's say that I'm willing to spend up to 50% of that as $750, but let's say to even get these metrics, that I would be willing to spend $1500 just to get the knowledge.

Nicholas: The pay for data.

Dean: Yeah to get the data. If I could break even and learn from that how to adjust the knobs and dials to get it down to $500 or $250, that would be thrilling.

Nicholas: Yeah, I think you bring up a great point.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Well I was going to say, I think you brought up a perfect point there. Because the question or objection that comes up and says well Nick what if I don't have that data? Then you've just got to go into month number one, with the perspective of okay, I'm going to be purchasing data this few weeks.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: A lot of people have a hard time with that but sometimes that's the best tuition you can pay for. If you know what your data is telling you, then all you need to do is reverse engineer the data and make the tweak that you need to make it a profitable campaign. That's a great point Dean, where people really sometimes where they don't have the data say, "Well, I'm going to allocate X number of budget towards purchasing data, trusting that I may not get a return on this, but I am going to get an education which is going to allow me to get a return the next time through."

Dean: That might be an approach that I would say okay, that would be a reasonable thing to say, "Okay, I'm going to allocate $1500 here for the 30 days here to get the data". Between now and Christmas let's say.

Nicholas: Sure.

Dean: That I'm going to be willing to spend or invest $1500 and know that the lead in of this is if I try and target towards a $5 opt in, that worst case scenario what I would have it, I would have spent $1500 and gotten 750 opt ins. Which I know that that's going to turn into something down the road. Even if none of them converted initially. That's the worst case it that I've got those 750.

Nicholas: Right, the worst case, you walk out of that experience with is a whole heap of leads that you can someday do something with as you expend that conversation.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah.

Dean: What kind of e-mail marketer would I be really Nick if I couldn't turn some number of 750 opt ins into clients that I could collaborate with.

Nicholas: Right.

Dean: That would be a shame, wouldn't it.

Nicholas: Well, you said it not me, but I'll just come into agreement with you.

Dean: Right. I think I believe in me, I think I believe in my abilities. That's funny. Okay, what have I not asked I guess? That would be the next thing, it's been very helpful for helping me clear up my stuff here too.

Nicholas: I think the only other thing that could be hanging in the balance maybe and again this could be a whole 90 minute conversation so we're not going to go there necessarily but I think one of the ... Now that we have the lead magnet, we know what's being offered, we know how to kind of structure some of the bidding and what our approach to that would be. We know what we're looking for on the landing page and how we need to follow up after that. Maybe I could give one or two kind of tips or tricks on crafting a highly converting ad.

Dean: Yes terrific.

Nicholas: No one's kind of stuck thinking, "Well, geez, how am I supposed to"-

Dean: Yeah, why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I think of that and the format of the ads. Like if I look at the ... You hear me tearing pages from my notebook here, we're moving onto my sixth page.

Nicholas: Awesome.

Dean: That's good, the ad, the content, the format, and choosing news feed versus right hand versus mobile.

Nicholas: Right. Just for the sake of this conversation and for the sake of keeping things very clean and easy. Although we can deviate and talk about some samurai tricks if we need to. I'm going to suggest that for the person who is starting out or is doing well and just needs to improve. We're going to say, we're primarily going to go with news feed ads and they're going to be full kind of conversion based ads. If our objective is to capture the lead, then our objective from a campaign standpoint is a website conversion. Which means that it's going to allow us to put copy, it's going to allow us to put an image. It's going to allow us to use a headline and some sub headline kind of copy all throughout that.

Dean: Mm-hmm

Nicholas: Now, what I will say, because you did bring this up between desktop and mobile. We say run both, I mean the traffic is heavily mobile biased right now on Facebook. The one thing I will say about that is if you are setting up news feed ads which is where we're going to be our safe place right now. When you're setting up your ad sets, you're going to separate news feed mobile and you're going to separate news feed desktop. If you put those two together what tends to happen is Facebook is going to favor the mobile and your desktop users are not in fact going to see the ad. If we separate it out, that just gives a little bit more control to let us know is desktop converting better or is mobile converting better?

Dean: I consider myself smart then. Because that was my choice, desktop news feed, right.

Nicholas: Now, that being said and here's just maybe a little side samurai trick that we are in fact testing and we're finding some great results with. We were having a conversation when you were here in Toronto about Cialdini's newest book Pre-Suasion.

Dean: Yeah, love it.

Nicholas: As I was reading that book and thank you for the recommendation by the way. As I was reading that book, something called out to me that I really wanted to test and that was this. I said, "Well we all know that when we're on any platform for that matter, but specifically for Facebook, that on the right hand side that those are clearly ads". I think the general population has been conditioned to ignore ads. That's just how it kind of goes. Our general rule of thumb for so many years has been well ignore the right hand rail ads for the time being unless you're going to do some retargeting or something like that, where people already are familiar with you. Then you can go into that space.

Based on Pre-Suasion, I decided to try something interesting, I decided to on the right hand rail put ads which were just image based of my image. Traditionally I wouldn't actually encourage someone to do this, because if you're going after a cold market, the person doesn't know who you are. If they don't know who you are, your picture's probably not going to get them to opt in to anything. What I did notice was, if those images are on the right hand side Dean, subconsciously, people are ignoring it, but they are seeing your image.

Dean: Yeah, I remember seeing some of the numbers from Pre-Suasion that were just like mind blowing. You're right, absolutely, okay.

Nicholas: Yeah, so what I wanted to see was will my news feed ads perform better if I did in fact have some subconscious kind of right hand rail ads going with just my image and not really much of a call to action or no real desire to capture the lead on that right hand side versus if I didn't. The experiment is still young admittedly, but what we are noticing is when we run them side by side, our news feed ads actually get better performance, because I believe subconsciously there's something going onto say, "Well, wait a second, I've seen that guy before, I just keep seeing him, who is he?"

Dean: Yes.

Nicholas: The branding that comes with that actually lends to the direct response that's coming from the news feed. That's just kind of a side note there.

Dean: Okay. Remind me later, I have such a top secret, covert thing to share with you that I'm going to test so I want to revisit that conversation.

Nicholas: Do you want to talk about that now?

Dean: No. We'll do it. I want to test it along with you. We can do something there. I think it could be huge. It's good.

Nicholas: Got it, so when it comes to the ad again we could spend a whole ton of time with this but I think there are three important elements that cannot be ignored in any ad. The words I like to use to jog that memory is look, hook and took. Look represents capturing attention. The reality is that someone on Facebook is probably scrolling through their news feed at light speed. As a result if you can't capture their attention first, your greatest acts of pre-suasion or persuasion, and influence are all going to be for not. Because if I catch attention, then none of the other stuff matters.

Dean: Yeah.

Nicholas: If I'm looking at an ad, what's the easiest way I can capture attention? Well Facebook is a heavily, image driven platform. What I've noticed is that 80% of success that comes from capturing attention is actually going to rely on the image selection that you choose. There's two general rules that I do with images. Rule number one is that it's got to pop. In other words it's got to stand out from all the other images that are in the news feed. How do I do that? Well, number one and this is just some samurai stuff that we've been using. Simply throw that into Photoshop and increase the contrast by 30% or so. Simply when someone is scrolling through their news feed if they see image after image, after image, and then one that just pops a little harder than everyone else. All of a sudden they're going to stop in their tracks and you have that split second to see if they're going to start reading your copy.

I would think you could either do that or you could do the opposite, which would be put it to gray scale or black and white. Again, if they're seeing color image after color image, after color image, and all of a sudden there's a black and white image, that's going to stop them in their tracks. You have a split second to catch attention there. That would be an image hack that I think anyone can deploy almost immediately to capture attention. That's a look.

Then we move onto hook and hook is all about creating connection. If look is all about capturing attention, then hook is all about creating connection. I think there's multiple ways to do this but one of the ways that I like to talk about here is ... I realize I'm not a great copywriter, I've studied great copy writers, I've done my best and I'm not a great copywriter. In today's web 2.0 social media driven world, I think what trumps perfectly written copy is when your copy can actually create connection with the person who's reading it. I don't know who I heard say this, but I think someone had said that great communication is not when your ideal prospect understands you, but when that ideal prospect feels understood by you.

Dean: Yes, right.

Nicholas: In our ad copy amongst many other things, but in our ad copy, we are making every intention to create connection through our words. One of the easiest ways I find to do that is through simple copy sequence that I guess someone stated is known as feel, felt, found. In other words, your copy sequence will not necessarily use these words, but they will convey these messages of "Hey, I know how you feel, I have felt the same way too, until I have found this very thing that I'm giving you".

Maybe for E-mail Mastery, it could touch upon the feeling and felt portion is when someone's going to make a decision based on four motivating factors, fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations. If we can identify those things and communicate them maybe in E-mail Mastery could be something along the lines of "At one point in my life, maybe I'm writing as you", you'd clean this up for sure. At one point in my life, I had this great message that I wanted to share with the world but no matter what I did, I could not generate leads with this message or whatever it'd be. Essentially you want someone to say, "Hey, I know how you feel with that". I know how you feel, I've felt the same way too, I know what it's like to struggle, not to be able to get leads with my message, until I found this simple system that I call E-mail Mastery. You know, it's kind of the feel, felt, found thing.

The real goal here is no matter how good or bad of a copywriter you may perceive yourself to be. If you can inject copy that creates connections through feel, felt, found kind of formula. I think you're going to be way better off. People are going to naturally again in a social context are going to just say, "Hey, that guy's speaking to me, I need to know what he has to offer and take that next step with him."

Dean: Right.

Nicholas: We got look which is capture attention, we got hook which is create connection, and then thirdly, took, which is give someone action. In other words we know that in our space as a call to action. Dean, here's how it came across. This is the first time I'd written an ad and it was for a lead magnet and one of the first comments in the ad was, "Yes I want it, how do I get it?"

Dean: Perfect.

Nicholas: I'm thinking, geez guys.

Dean: Exactly right.

Nicholas: Click the bloody ad. Then it dawned on me that not everybody knows exactly what to do.

Dean: You weren't being-

Nicholas: Yeah, I wasn't being clear. Now, for the love of God, every element I can possibly put in an ad I'm going to put some form of call to action that blatantly says click here to get the very thing that I just told you that I want to give you. You can do that in the above ad copy. You can maybe factor that in even to your image. You can put that in the headline. You can put that in the sub headline text. You can even put it in the display URL. I mean just give people clear instructions on what they need to do in order for them to get the very thing that you're asking them to take. Now, of course, there's variations and things we can do with that. For example, I love ... Remember, the point of the ad is we get the click. In our copy, we always like to put a hyperlink. Because naturally if they see a hyperlink, naturally someone has the intention to want to click on it.

Dean: Right in the ad.

Nicholas: Right in the ad, yeah absolutely. Just some various things like that, but I think if someone is crafting an ad, they can take few steps back and think about look, hook, and took. How can I capture attention? How can create connection? How can I give someone specific action? Their ads are going to start outperforming their previous ad. They're going to get even better results.

Dean: Yeah. That's awesome. Those formats in that news feed situation, if I were trying to create the equivalent of what I did with the Success magazine ad for instance. There's maybe an example of a great pond, would be the people who like Success Magazine on Facebook.

Nicholas: Right, of course.

Dean: There's probably a great community there. Right okay. What I had been experimenting with was creating a post. Like I've done some boosted posts for my E-mail Mastery page just recently of basically taking that article, turning it into a post and having a call to action be to go to E-mail Mastery. I've found that under-performing. Would it be to just get the hook or click here to go to a page where I recreate that article there, to then have them download the book?

Nicholas: Yes.

Dean: That's what you're saying would be the result.

Nicholas: Yeah a 1000% because we've tested really, really long form copy in our ad and I think there's just a lot of resistance for someone who's scrolling news feed and is not used to spending time on one ad. I would in fact recreate the advertorial on some sort of a web page. Then rather than at the end of that advertorial having a call to action to go to a second web page, I would just allow them through a shadow box, click a button to pop up a shadow box opt in and opt in right there. Then the side note to that would be put retargeting pixel on that page, so that anyone that doesn't opt in the first time, you're obviously going to re-target them back to that page or another page for that matter. With a supplementary offer that's going to help capture that lead if it doesn't in fact work out that first time.

Dean: Yeah, that's awesome. Cool.

Nicholas: I'm a big fan of utilizing ... What you can do if you were to take that advertorial and embed it on an actual HTML webpage or using some sort of landing page creator, is that you can actually give them multiple options to opt in. Through your hyperlink.

Dean: Yeah, put a picture of the book in the side bar, with a form right there and a link at the bottom, all those above the fold so they're right on the bottom, all of that, you create that environment.

Nicholas: Everywhere you can. Yeah, exactly, I think it's a great alternative landing page that tends to perform quite well in social context now. Again, I think a lot of the times social users are a little bit jaded with the traditional opt in page. Granted they work like gang buster, so I would never advise anyone to stop. Some people are just jaded by it and they feel like people are hiding behind the landing pages and so sometimes when you can offer content first ... Here's another play that I do often is I might drive them to the original opt in page first. You get massive opt in rates so it's crazy. Let's say you drive them to the original opt in page first and for the 40% or 30% that don't opt in, you re-target to your advertorial landing page.

Dean: Yes, right.

Nicholas: Because maybe they didn't have enough on that initial page to get them to want to opt in but now you can pre-frame them with further content, now you have a higher probability of them opting in and vice versa, right? You have options, when you have multiple landing pages that you can deploy

Dean: Mm-hmm, that makes total sense.

Nicholas: Yeah.

Dean: Nick, you said it all basically.

Nicholas: Well, you've said it all, I've just filled in the gaps.

Dean: I think I've run you dry of all the information I can get from you. No, I don't believe that for a second. That's the tip of the iceberg. I really think what this is going to be the most useful for people who are thinking about Facebook as an opportunity for them, I think. To hear this is the way, I think I've found it very useful to have this conversation with you, so I appreciate that.

Nicholas: I'm so glad.

Dean: Where would you direct people to go start their journey? With your or through Facebook in general? What kind of next steps would you have people take?

Nicholas: Sure, I think there's one of a couple options and thank you for asking. I mean one option is we have a Facebook group, called Facebook Marketing Mastery, 100% free, there's about 13,000 people in there and it's growing at about 100 people a day. It's just an awesome community of Facebook advertisers. Everywhere from beginners all the way to some of the most elite in our space. We're all just sharing some great content. If anyone's in that space, Facebook Marketing Mastery is a Facebook group that I encourage anybody to join and just kind of join that community.

Secondly if you've heard stuff like this and you've found like the 3C process to be valuable, the click, capture, convert, but you feel a little bit overwhelmed in having to figure out how to do this yourself. We hold six, two day intensives throughout the year, where we put 20 business owners together in a room and our big promise is this. Look you arrive with whatever you have and you leave with your top of funnel lead generation system built with me, right there on the spot. You're not leaving with a to do list, you're leaving with a done list. You're having the opportunity to have me look over your shoulders and do some work with you that way. You can get that information at NicholasKusmich.com/intensive. Again, NicholasKusmich.com/intensive and there's all the information about that.

Then of course, every so often, I'll write a good piece of content on my blog, I should be writing a lot more than I do now, but I commit to getting some more good content out there. All things me, can be found at NicholasKusmich.com, including what we do and how we do it and some content and all that's around there as well. Those are the various ways someone can kind of reach out and see what we're up to.

Dean: Perfect and where can someone get your book?

Nicholas: The book is being worked on Dean.

Dean: Oh, that was trick question, did you see that?

Nicholas: Yeah, that's a great setup. I'm going to have to do a 98, 90 day book and just get her done.

Dean: Listen, we've done it, we could turn this into it. You've got-

Nicholas: Well there you go.

Dean: You see what I'm saying, you didn't even know it but you've written a book today.

Nicholas: See that, so if you haven't written a 90 day book, that's how you do it right there.

Dean: It's not the 90 day book, it's the 90 minute book.

Nicholas: 90 minute book, I apologize.

Dean: That's what most people think, that's their highest aspiration is to think, 90 days I'm going to get my book done in the next 90 days.

Nicholas: I know because most people, it's a nine year process.

Dean: That's exactly it, you just wrote a book and you didn't even know it.

Nicholas: You're absolutely right Dean and I don't know if that was the original intention but if it isn't, I'm glad it's a bi-product.

Dean: There we go. You know, that would be a great thing for NicholasKusmich.com to have that.

Nicholas: I agree 100%.

Dean: A book on your process right there.

Nicholas: You take me offline, you tell me how we can finalize that up and I'd be more than happy to do that.

Dean: Perfect, we'll do it. Okay, well, I appreciate the time. I think this is very valuable and I think we'll get a lot of people started on the path here.

Nicholas: I just thank you for the opportunity to hang out with you a little bit. Geniuses like you help makes the world and our world go around, so I appreciate your time.

Dean: Perfect, thanks so much.

Nicholas: Thanks Dean.

Dean: Wow, that was a marathon, but the most valuable type of marathon. I got so much out of that. I loved that as we started going, I was realizing man, this is the kind of stuff that we could turn into a book. That's what this really ends up. You know we got so much content in here that we've created a book for Nicholas and so I think that we'll have some great success with that. There'd be a great, convenient way for you to revisit all the information that we talked about in this episode. Stay tuned, I'll get you all the information about where we can get the book and I'll put it in the show notes on MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com. You can do two things there, first of all you'll be able to get a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and we'll have a link to where we can get the book that we did hear with Nicholas.

What I want you to understand that some of the things we were talking about in there, that really is how easy it can be for you to create a book if you wanted to have that kind of a conversation, where you're sharing your expertise and packaging it up in a book. I'd love to help you with that. If you go to 90minutebook.com, you can download a copy of the 90 minute book, using that exact format that I use to create books. You'll see that there's nothing more powerful than a book as a lead magnet. Especially if you're going to start doing this on Facebook. Check out 90minutebook.com or 90minutebooks.com, either one of them will get you to the place where you can start the journey of writing your own book. I hope to be able to help you through that process. Okay, have a great week and I will talk to you next time.