Oh boy. This is Dean Jackson, reporting live after a very special call with Ari Meisel. We recorded a More Cheese, Less Whiskers episode that’s going to blow your doors off.
We hatched a real wonderful scheme for our year. You may know Ari Meisel as the author of The Art of Less Doing. He's been a good friend and I completely resonate with everything he talks about. We had a great chance to have a conversation about the number one thing he could do to grow his business in the next year.
I think you're really going to enjoy this one.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 078
Dean: Ari Meisel
Ari: You interrupted really good hold music.
Dean: You like that, don't you?
Ari: Yeah. You know George Bryant?
Dean: No, I don't.
Ari: He's a marketing guy. He did the Civilized Caveman. It was like the number one paleo blog and he does a lot of marketing stuff with Onnit now but anyways, he's going to be at the event and Sally Hogshead is confirmed. She'll be there too.
Dean: Oh, perfect. I love Sally. Great. We're recording right now so I'll set a little context for it because just before we got on the call here, Ari and I recorded a Facebook Live about the event that Ari is doing in Miami in March. So that's what we want to kind of talk about, so maybe it would be a good idea to set the stage here and tell what's actually up, and now that we know we've got Sally coming and I'm going to be there and George is going to be there, what's going on? What's the theme and everything?
Ari: Yeah. Well, thanks, Dean. So it's the Less Doing Live Intensive Coaching Event March 14-16 in Miami, in beautiful Miami, and I say that now as I'm sitting next to a pile of snow, but we've got a great location there and it's going to be three days of just total productivity reboot and accelerator. And it's cool that you're going to be there, Dean, since the first event I ever did, the first Less Doing Live event was back in 2015, and it was a very different format, but that was my first event, and you were there and you killed it. You gave a great presentation about building a business that doesn't kill your life, essentially.
Dean: Fuck your life, yeah.
Ari: Exactly. So this is going to be an opportunity ... it'll be a relatively small event. We're maxing it out at 40 people, so it'll be pretty intimate. We're going to get to go through all of the fundamentals of the Less Doing system as well as the five biggest productivity challenges that most business face. Everything from communication and project management to automation and outsourcing. We're going to talk about those as well as actual strategies to overcome them and people will walk away from this event having implemented a lot of what they've learned, so they'll actually be able to walk out of there with systems and processes in place that will help empower their teams so that they can become more replaceable, and optimize and automate and outsource everything that they shouldn't be doing.
Dean: Perfect. Okay, where do you want to focus on? You're really talking about the marketing of this or the approach to spreading this or growing beyond this. What do you think would be a good focus for us to really get the most out of the time here today?
Ari: Oh, okay, so this is not part of the episode, then?
Dean: Yeah, no, it is. This is the episode.
Ari: Oh, it is. Okay, fine.
Dean: This is the episode. It's all about trying to brainstorm and this was kind of like really a conversation between you and I that we might have even offline-
Ari: I love it.
Dean: And just let people listen on how we brainstorm, so that's the whole focus on-
Ari: Perfect.
Dean: The episode, yeah. So you and I focused for the hour on for your benefit, right here.
Ari: Thank you very much. Okay, got it. So then I guess then I should sort of give you the context too of what the Less Doing sort of ecosphere looks like at this point.
Dean: Okay, yeah.
Ari: The focus of Less Doing is really on coaching and I think that we help with various programs, but essentially we help six figure entrepreneurs become seven figure entrepreneurs by removing obstacles and getting them there faster, and we help seven figure entrepreneurs become eight figure entrepreneurs by really helping them to put proper systems in place and train their teams to do what they do. In some cases, better than they've been doing it. And that's what I think really my unique ability is, because at the end of the day, I want entrepreneurs and founders to be able to focus on what they do best because that is the best possible thing that they can do for their businesses, their families, and probably for the world at large.
The current sort of framework and path that we have in place starts with the Less Doing labs, which is our free community that's on Facebook and Slack. We've got over 1,200 people in that community now, and it's just people jamming on productivity every day. How can I automate this? What's the best tool to do this? How can I focus more? All those kinds of questions, and there's a community of people who are on that same journey helping them. We have our boot camp basically, which is a 10 week long program that really is for those six figure entrepreneurs who want to get to seven, and it takes them through a video module every week with a worksheet and a live coaching call every week as well, so over the course of 10 weeks, they'll really get that fundamental ... that foundation to be able to take themselves to the next level and really grow their business without necessarily adding more resources. In most cases, they can reduce resources.
Once they graduate from that, they are oftentimes a candidate for the Mastermind, which I run, and my Mastermind is a really empowered group of entrepreneurs who are doing really interesting things. They're growing their businesses really fast, and they need those systems in place because essentially, they have an excess of opportunity that they can't take advantage of because they don't have that structure to be able to do it properly. So I help them build that, and in the Mastermind, we have these three events. So these three events are really there to support people in an intensive way and also prepare them to possibly join the Mastermind to even further accelerate their growth. So the three day events, we have the first two days are the groundwork, the foundation, and then the third day is really meant for the Mastermind people to go deep on whatever that challenge is.
And beyond that, once somebody becomes an eight figure business, then they're really a good candidate for our business consulting, and that's where we actually start working with the whole team and help with putting full systems in place for better communication, more effective project task management, and documenting and implementing processes that are just completely bulletproof.
Dean: Right. Okay. I love it. So you really-
Ari: So that's the whole thing, yeah.
Dean: So that kind of goes all the way down. What are the different price points right now? So the group that you're talking about is a free group or is it a-
Ari: Yeah, so the Less Doing Labs is a totally free community and there's a lot of good content there and there's a lot of support. The 10 week course is a $1,500 offering that people can go through and the events, so if somebody would just come to the event, it's $2,500, and that's what this event at Miami is, and then joining the Mastermind is $2,000 a month, and then they come to the events as well. So those are the three levels and then once we get into the business consulting, there are a couple of different offerings but essentially, it ends up being around $50,000 a year to do the business consulting.
Dean: Okay, perfect. And so when you look at this now, like what's your constraint right now? Is there anything stopping you or slowing you from scaling this to whatever level you want?
Ari: Yeah, so at this point, we are literally only limited by the numbers of leads that come in the door, so we're pretty good at conversion I would say, it's just getting more and more leads that is what we need. So this Tuesday for example, I'm doing a webinar to help promote this course that we have and then once they're in that sort of framework, then they can see what the future looks like and what there is to aspire to, but just getting more and more leads and I guess at the free level, converting people to be paid, but yeah, more leads.
Dean: Okay. So we look at it ... now, this is an interesting thing, that you've got the book, Less Doing, which really kind of lets people get behind the philosophies that you're figuring that people can get an understanding of what you're talking about. It's one of those great book titles in that you immediately know what it's about when you look at it, even the cover. The icon that you have for it indicates graphically what it's about, that it's about less doing. Now, what are you doing with that to generate leads right now? Did you publish that book or is it self-published?
Ari: So the first Less Doing book, Less Doing, More Living, was published by Penguin Random House, and then the second one, which is the Art of Less Doing, which was sort of an update, that was self-published through Book In A Box. So what am I doing with it? I don't know if I'm doing anything necessarily. People definitely have responded well to the book. I have had a podcast that also does really well but I wouldn't say I do something, per se. I should.
Dean: Okay, well there's the thing. So I think that when you look at it, that you're immediately getting the attention of people who resonate with that, when you have a good title. Examples that I use of like book titles as ... Financial Peace is a great example that I use all the time. Dave Ramsey's book, that if somebody's in financial turmoil and they see a book called "Financial Peace", they're going to lower their blood pressure just by touching the cover of that book. That's kind of the way it is, that for people who are stressed and very busy, to see something like "Less Doing, and More Living" completely gets to the core of what it is that they really want. The person who is attracted to that is your ideal candidate. It really becomes about how you spread that book around, I think as a front end.
Right now, what are you doing to get the word out about the book, or how does it ... let's back up for a second. I want to talk about the two experiences, the publishing through Penguin. What was the experience of that in terms of how supportive were they in getting the book out and introducing you to the people who are the readers?
Ari: I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, probably like a 1.
Dean: Right, so there's the thing. It's like that's where you look at it. Publishing a book, and I use it as an example all the time, that just publishing the book and putting everything in there is not the ticket to the Promised Land. So the new book, the Art of Less Doing, what's going on with that? How is that one getting out into the world here?
Ari: Right, so every email that we send out, we have a super signature too, of course.
Dean: Yeah, I noticed. I love that.
Ari: Which is awesome, it really is. It's awesome, and so people can get a copy or the first two chapters of the book for signing up to the newsletter so that's one of the things that we have done, and then I have the podcast but again, I can't say that I've done any really targeted book promotion per se, and it sounds so silly saying this out loud now because you're right, the book is really the ultimate sort of indoctrination for what we do and how we do it.
Dean: Right. I look at it, and this is something that's kind of interesting because Joe Polish and I did a I Love Marketing episode with Tucker and we were talking about the ... because I have a company called 90-Minute Books and we help people create lead generating books for their business because I really believe there's nothing like a book that is the front end of something, like to gather the right people, and so when you look at it, if the barrier is to get somebody to come into your world, if that's the thing that starts the whole ecosystem kind of growing, then I would be looking at how can you get that in front of as many people as you can. And I would look at doing it almost on a free basis, if you look at the economics of it. When you look at the thing, your title, the "Less Doing" or "the Art of Less Doing", either one, do you still have the rights to "Less Doing" or what's the situation with that?
Ari: "The Art of Less Doing" is the one that I have the most freedom with which is the one that I would probably quote the most.
Dean: Okay, perfect. So when you look at this that you got that opportunity there, right now, do you have anything that is predictably bringing new opt-ins like a vending machine for you? Like where you could say, "I'm going to put this money in the top and out the bottom is going to come 1,000 new subscribers?"
Ari: Like a Facebook funnel or something like that?
Dean: Yeah, like anything that introduces you to the right people.
Ari: Really not.
Dean: Or is it all happening organically?
Ari: It's all been organic. It really all has been organic at this point.
Dean: Okay. So, part of-
Ari: I do speaking events and stuff and I'm in certain networks that you're into, like we're in Strategic Coach and Genius Network but yeah, it's all been organic, and I think it's time to take that to the next level.
Dean: Yeah, because you've got such a great message and supporting it with the podcast is really a great vehicle, like you look at what you've got in terms of gathering attention with everybody. The podcast is a wonderful way to kind of solidify your relationship with the community, with people who resonate with the book, and then they realize, oh, there's a podcast here, and then they're listening to you, and they're every week going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great." And now you're, within that ecosystem, you've got all of these opportunities to present next steps to people, which is what the super signature is about. In every email, you've got whatever your next steps are. I remember seeing your super signature and smiling because it's such a ... whenever I see a super signature in the wild, it makes me happy.
Ari: Did Taki get that from you?
Dean: Yes, of course, yeah.
Ari: Yeah, okay, because I learned it from Taki, but-
Dean: Ah, interesting. So Taki has come to one of my Breakthrough Blueprints, we've done consulting, and he's in my Email Mastery program, but Taki ... the greatest endorsement of the super signature ever is him posting in our Facebook group that he was doing a report on what's been happening with the stuff he was doing and then he said, "Oh, and by the way, that super signature is like finding an extra $5,000 in your pocket three times a week." Which is so great because that's exactly how it can happen, that you've got all of these people that you are maintaining your relationship with and you've got the opportunity to present them the next steps. So that's good. That's so funny, full circle, that you learned it from Taki. It's great.
Ari: Yeah, well, he gives you credit for like, everything, so I should have known.
Dean: So when you look at it, what are the offers on your super signature right now?
Ari: Yeah, sure, I can tell you right now. Okay, so it says, "P.S. In the meantime, check out these four effective ways I can help you reclaim your time. One is listen to the Less Doing podcast." Oh, you know what, that's really funny. Oh, so my book offer's not on here in the super signature because if they get the email, that means that they signed up for the newsletter, which means that they got the first two chapters already.
Dean: Yep, perfect.
Ari: So it's listen to the podcast, second is join the Less Doing Labs on Facebook or Slack, and then the third one is basically the course, and the fourth one is the Mastermind.
Dean: Perfect, so you got all those things. So when you send it out, have you had people click on all of those things from ... how long have you been doing the super signature?
Ari: About a month.
Dean: Okay, great. And so you've had people click through on all of those?
Ari: Yeah, well, I don't know if this is how you taught it, but for the third and the fourth ones, which are the paid ones, we ask them to reply with a keyword, basically.
Dean: Yeah.
Ari: Yeah, so we've definitely gotten some traction on that for sure.
Dean: Perfect. And there's the thing. It's like what you've got is this environment now, this opportunity to get that message in front of people and how often do you mail that list?
Ari: Three times a week. Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
Dean: Three times a week. I love it. Okay. So you're modeling. That's really good.
Ari: I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.
Dean: That's so funny. Okay, perfect. So the cool thing is that you've got all of those opportunities now and what really drives this is just like you said, getting more leads in the door, here. So I would look at if you're thinking about your driving things forward there, this is a great front end. Primarily, our two front ends that drive everything are my free book author for the Email Mastery book and our free book offer for the 90-Minute Book. And I'm constantly running Facebook ads to continually add people into the front end here and so if you look at it that if you could get 1,000 new subscribers right now, what do you think that those 1,000 subscribers might be worth over the next 12 months to you?
Ari: Yeah, see, that's a really good point. Let's see. I could probably tell you. Let's say that 1% of them become Mastermind members, so 1% is 10 of that, which is great. So 10 Mastermind members for a year is a quarter of a million dollars right there, and then let's say that 10% of those people come to the course, so that's $1,500 per person, is that $150,000 there?
Dean: Could be, yeah.
Ari: Yeah, so that's another $150,000, and the events have a certain capacity but let's just say that half of the events get filled up by those people, so that's 40 and then 50 is 90, that's like another quarter million dollars. So, yeah, 1,000 people should be worth like half a million dollars.
Dean: Okay, so that's a great thing when you look at that, right? Another way to kind of benchmark it for yourself is to think about the total number of people that you have on your list and the total revenue that you generated from that list last year to get a ballpark of per subscriber per year, what that's worth for you. And when you look at it right there, that even your ads, $500 or $1,000, somewhere in that $400, $500 per subscriber per year, if you look at the numbers that you're sharing with me there, it would just make sense that if you could get those opt-ins, if you could let's even say for $5, if you could get people, the right audience, to download your book for $5, that would be so valuable to you, right?
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. The truth is that I've never ever done anything that was like a list building strategy.
Dean: Right. And I think that's an interesting way to look at that. What I try and get most people to think about is to shift their mindset from thinking about advertising and spending money on Facebook with an expense-based approach, meaning that they're thinking about I'm going to spend this money and then I'm going to track what happens after I sent people through my gauntlet series, and what they turn into before the credit card bill is due on the ads that I've spent. They're trying to recapture that and run it at a profit initially, and I try and get people to take more of a capital investment approach to it and think about your list, think about subscribers, people who have opted in because they've been attracted to this message "Less Doing" that what's the value of that over the next 12 months, 24 months, and beyond?
That's kind of eye-opening right now. If you could say, if you knew that's that ... even if we cut your estimates by half or even more, if you could look at if we could get you opt-ins for $5, which would be on the high end of reasonable for that, that you would have $5,000 invested in generating a capital asset of 1,000 entrepreneurs.
Ari: Yeah, so now you're doing that primarily with Facebook ads?
Dean: Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative). And so you look at it that perpetually, because I know that every time ... and I know that these are the kind of things ... I'm not basing everything that I'm doing on trying to get the fastest sale that I can. I'm looking at building the most valuable audience that I can. I'm looking at it that I'm planting orange groves, where I look at it that I'm investing in an asset that's going to yield people who whenever they're ready. That's sort of the way we approach it on the super signature. Plus, whenever you're ready, here are four ways I can help you. So whenever they're ready, there's the next step for them. What I would probably look at for you is to as fast as you can get to a point where you have a faucet that you can turn on and off, where you can get to a point where you can get as many $3, $4, $5 subscribers as you can, as fast as you can.
Ari: So how many people are opting into your list every day?
Dean: So it depends on high I'm going but we've done things where we can do a full page ad in Success Magazine where we'll get hundreds of opt-ins a day or you can get it to where you're doing 50 opt-ins a day or 10 opt-ins a day or whatever level you want. And I look at it that what I'm most interested in is then the conversion process. Like I look at it that when we do ... I'll share with you like a 90-Minute Book campaign. One of the things that we will do is run a 90-Minute Book ad campaign to somebody's audience so say, Brendon Burchard. So we'll run ads through Brendon's audience and offer a free copy of the 90-Minute Book. And I'll run the ads over a weekend and I was doing this to illustrate how people could use 90-Minute Book themselves in a way.
So we would run over the weekend an ad from Friday to Sunday, and get opt-ins for ... it was getting opt-ins for maybe $1.60, $1.80, that kind of level and then on Tuesday, I would send out a message to everybody that had opted in, and share with them what had happened over the weekend. So I'd say, "Facebook 90-Minute Book Facebook Campaign Results." And I would say, "Hey, Ari, I thought you might like to see what happened with the Facebook campaign we were running this weekend and I would describe how it all played out, that we would get $0.60 a click and we would get 60% of the people that came to the page to opt in and that we share the numbers and I intentionally did it at a level where I was spending $150 a day on it because that's a level that anybody could see themselves doing.
Because I think people have this perception that in order to do Facebook ads they've got to be spending $1,000 a day or scaling up that way, which you can do, but the beautiful thing is you can start with $20 a day. It doesn't matter. It's the same thing. It's a marketplace. You can dip your bucket in the well as big a bucket as you want. So if you have a $20 bucket, you dip it in, and you get 4 or 5 subscribers. That's the way that it goes but what happens with them is where it all kind of unfolds. So the more important thing is that when I said that to people, and I shared with them everything that we were doing, then I would describe also what was going on, that I would point out to people that this is kind of some meta-level stuff that I'm sharing with you, because I would share the story with them but I'm going you the behind the scenes of how the behind the scenes thing actually works, which is kind of a different thing.
So I'm sharing with them the behind the scenes, which is saying, "I basically spent this much money and I got clicks for this much and I got opt-ins for this much, and then I kind of presented how it worked from their perspective, that they were just sitting there and all of a sudden, here comes this bright orange book in their newsfeed called the 90-Minute Book, and it probably made you think, well, what's this? Can you really read a book in 90 minutes? So they check it out and they go to the page and they opt-in, and I know that everybody reading this message went through that process, because the only way they're getting the message is they opted in.
So it's irrefutable proof that this book advertising gets people to opt-in because you can't argue against that. You opted in because of it. And then I point out to people that what you didn't know when you opted in was you saw the title, you saw that it was a book, you saw that I was offering it for free, you were compelled to leave your name and your email address, and what you didn't know was how many pages the book was, or how long I took to write it, or how professionally edited the third paragraph of chapter two was. None of that made any impact on your decision to download this book right now. But the more important thing is that it got us in this conversation. And so I explain to people that I did this so that they can see how they could use this in their business and then I said, "P.S. Whenever you're ready, I've got a whole team of people standing by to help you write your book in just 90 minutes and here's how it works."
And then explain the whole process to them and tell them that it's $1,800 and if they want to write a book, just reply to this email and say, "I want to write a book." And what's happens. To this day, that's what drives the way that the 90-Minute Book works, and we've spun off a completely separate company now. We've got a team of nine people that that's all that they do, is help people write 90 minute books but what that also does is now, that opt-in is now in my world as an entrepreneur. That that's the beginning of all of the things. This whole integrated sweep of all of the ways that we can help entrepreneurs make more money. So they can come to a Breakthrough Blueprint event or they can be part of Email Mastery or they can use GoGoClients.com to set up the landing pages and the auto responders and all those things because I'm demonstrating how all of these tools work together.
The same thing is true exactly for you. That if you're getting people on the front end here of whether you're willing to give away copies of your book, it's far more valuable for you to get somebody who's attracted to that to leave their name and their email than it is to convince them to give you money to buy the book.
Ari: Yeah, now, when you-
Dean: The economics of it.
Ari: Right. Now, when you're sending out your emails ... so if somebody signs up, what do they get right away?
Dean: So right away, they get an email that is, "Here's the book, here's the link to the book, and here's a couple of other things, and whenever you're ready, here's how we can help you write your book." So immediately, I don't care whether people actually read the book, and the truth is probably a lot of people that we end up writing books with never actually read the 90-Minute Book because they just get swept up in the conversation and take a look at it and then go ahead and decide to do it themselves.
Ari: Right. That's really interesting. Okay.
Dean: So I look at it-
Ari: I'm trying to stay focused but my mind is like off in six different directions now, based on this.
Dean: Right. If I were running Less Doing, I would do this same thing. You've got a great title, you've got a great book. I would be doing ads that get people to opt-in for the book for free. I always want ... the thing that I always look at is that ... I look at the economics of it is that, and you know this yourself. If you're honest about the economic impact of publishing a book with Penguin, that it's underwhelming, what actually comes out of it at the end.
Ari: Yep, right.
Dean: Would that be fair to say?
Ari: Absolutely.
Dean: Right. But people have this perception that if I just get a publisher, then I'm on easy street, but you know, you've done it, and it's underwhelming, and right now, several years later, there's really not much residual happening from it, from just the fact that the book is out there. It's now everything that comes is because of you out driving it. You're still responsible for driving it. Penguin's not out there trying to figure out how to get people into your world.
Ari: Of course.
Dean: So if that's the situation, then it just makes sense that it would be far more valuable to you to give people this book for free because the thing is that it's more important that they resonate with it than that they give you money for it initially. If we just showed we did the estimates that it's worth half a million dollars or more to have 1,000 new subscribers, and even if you cut that drastically and we divide that by half or a quarter of that, or even a tenth of that, it's still ... even if it was a tenth of half a million.
Ari: Yeah, it's still a 10X return.
Dean: 50,000, it's still a 10X return, and what I'm saying is, I always say to people that if you take the big picture of this, sometimes it's less expensive to get the result for somebody than it is to convince them to give you money to get the result. And by that, I mean that it would cost you so much more money to get somebody to give you ... how much do you sell the book for now?
Ari: I think it's $12 on Amazon.
Dean: $12. So it's gonna cost you more than $12 to get somebody to give you $12 for the book. Does that make sense? That sounds accurate? Yes.
Ari: Yes.
Dean: And the truth is you don't even get all of that $12, right? So when you look at that, it's even less if you ... it's gonna be so much more valuable to you to give the book away and to build that list. Even if you just experimented with it. Let's just set aside that you're gonna give 1,000 copies away, just to test this, or even 100 copies, doesn't matter, but just to see that what this could be over the next 6, 12, 24 months. That asset of the person who says, "Wow, that's really fascinating." And the fact that they're ahead of the game on their relationship with you is so much more valuable than the $12.
Ari: Do you see value in giving the digital copy of the book to people-
Dean: Yeah.
Ari: Or does it's really have to be the physical? Oh, okay.
Dean: No, that's what we give people, is the digital. But I don't call it an e-book or I don't call it a digital book or anything like that. A book is a book, right?
Ari: Right.
Dean: Just the format, so I say, "free book", and that's the thing. And it looks like a book and there are actual physical copies and if somebody asks, "Can you send me a physical copy?” of course I would, and I often will use that as the next level to engage in the dialogue with people. I look at it like I want to use this as a way to start conversations with people so that I can lead them to the next steps for how I can help them make more money. So I'm crystal clear organizationally what our purpose is. What our outcome, my relationship is, and organizationally, we make entrepreneurs make more money. That's our guiding mission, and when you look at that, it means that everything that I do is a money-based outcome for them. I don't teach people skills or education or how to do anything. It's not how to set up and create your own webpage or how to create a blog or how to make a podcast or any of those things.
What I'm teaching people is an outcome-based making more money, and so everything that we do, whether it's from Email Mastery, where we teach people the skills to use email marketing to generate more money, or coming to a Breakthrough Blueprint to spend three days applying our 8-Profit Activators to their business. Those are all things where the outcome is that it's an investment that's going to produce a return on that capital that they've spent. And I always want to be ahead of the game. That's why you look at everything that we do in terms of all of the podcasts. Like the I Love Marketing podcast, we're up over 300 episodes of I Love Marketing right now. I'm just closing in on 100 episodes of More Cheese, Less Whiskers, which is truly only focused on one entrepreneur at a time making more money. We spend the whole hour focused on their business and ways that they can make more money. It's a legitimate consultation and people get to listen in on that.
What I really look to make sure that I'm on the right track is that people who come to a Breakthrough Blueprint or join Email Mastery or do a 90-Minute Book all come with a common element of "I feel like I've made money already just on applying the stuff you've shared with me for free." So they're ahead of the game.
Ari: This is incredibly valuable. When you offered me the opportunity to do this, I didn't realize how actionable and amazing this was going to be, so thank you for that. Do you mind me asking how big or roughly how big the list is that you have right now?
Dean: So how big would you expect like a guy like me with my profile or my footprint or whatever in the world would have? What would you expect that number to be?
Ari: 100,000.
Dean: Yeah, you would think that, wouldn't you? It's closer to 40,000. So it's not a big list.
Ari: But they're really good leads.
Dean: Absolutely. But I have people emailing me saying, "Listen, I'm switching emails. Can you make sure that I change my email because I don't want to miss any of these emails that you send me?" But that's where the thing is that it's a high value list. I have a great rapport with the list in that. All the emails are really about sending personal emails to people. That seems like they're only meant for one person at a time. And that's kind the thing, that's what I really show people to do is to really maximize what's happening so when somebody opts in, the opportunity that you have is they've never liked you more than that moment. That opt-in moment and the next 24 hours are kind of the peak of your relationship so far. They opted in for a 90-Minute Book and I'm able to say to people ... we send the initial message that gives them the book and the download and then invites them whenever you're ready here so that we can help you write your book.
I treat that situation like it may be the only opportunity that I have to communicate with them, and I'm not focused on, "Did you get the book? Did you get a chance to read it?" That's the weakest possible thing that you can come from. I just take people, the fact that they downloaded a book called the 90-Minute Book, and I just take it that that is an indication that they want to write a 90 minute book. I treat everybody like they're a five star prospect until they prove that they aren't versus treating everybody like they're not a five star prospect and having them jump through hoops to prove to me that they're a five star prospect.
Ari: Yeah, of course. So one specific question for you. So right now, we have an email opt-in that you get the first two chapters of the book for free. So it sounds like I should just give them the whole book.
Dean: That would be great, wouldn't it? What are you holding on to?
Ari: Why not, right?
Dean: Yeah, why not? It feels like you want to be generous, be generous to start off the relationship. Test it. You can test it. There's nothing like starting the relationship by being the generous one.
Ari: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah. So when you look at it that if you then think about that is in our world, when we talk about the 8-Profit Activators, profit activator number one is select a single target audience. So if you were to say, like who would be the right audience for you? It's entrepreneurs who have six figure businesses, that's really who you're best thing is, right? Self-directed people?
Ari: Yeah.
Dean: And so if you look at that, then, profit activator two is how do we get those people to raise their hand, because those are sort of invisible prospects, right? People who resonate with your message. So all I want to do with profit activator two is about compelling people to raise their hand. I'm not trying to convince people to do anything. This is where the advertising really gets its most juice, is if I can ... my approach when we did the full page ad in Success Magazine was not how can I convince people to buy my Email Mastery program, that wasn't it at all. My question, my come from on that was what would I do if I wanted to make this the most valuable page in the magazine? What would I do if Success Magazine was paying me to run the ad? To write the ad, versus me paying them to run it? And so I took that article approach in that when you look at it, most direct response wisdom would say that you want to write an ad that sells the sizzle and not the steak.
That you say an amazing nine word email that revives dead leads, and then you use the whole ad to say, "These nine words are so powerful, and once you know these nine words, an Arizona man tried these nine words, and here's what happens. And you can get these nine words at this website." Trying not giving anything away, but then trying to get them to give you their name and email to get the value. And so I took the approach of let's give them the whole thing. If you read that article, that's the way I wrote it. If you read that article, you know everything you need to know about how to send a nine word email. And then I said, "And there's so much more I can give you, the subject lines, and case studies, and of examples of how to do it in my book, Email Mastery, that you can get for free at EmailMastery.com." That compels people to leave their name and their email. I'm not trying to convince them to do it. They're compelled to do it because now they really want to try this out.
Now, as soon as you looked at that, the thing that you want to kind of keep focused on is that those are individual people now. That's why you don't need a huge list. Most of the time, the reason people have these big lists is because they're spending all this money to send people to their tripwire offer to get them to buy something right now, send them through their gauntlet series, and if they don't buy, then they just keep sending them affiliate offers, then. They're not adding value to people. And so when you have this approach that you're starting out by giving something to somebody and that you know that that person, by virtue of asking for, being attracted to the thing that you're offering them, is somebody who is your ideal prospect because you pre-framed it that the person who wants to download a book called "Less Doing" is going to be somebody who is doing more right now and wants to do less.
Ari: Yeah. Excess of opportunity.
Dean: Yes. And so now, as soon as they opt-in, then you've got the opportunity to say, "Welcome aboard." And I always have people imagine that you're opt-in page is like a portal to your office. That as soon as they press "submit", they're magically transported and there's a little knock on your door, and they open it up and say, "Hey, I'm here about the Less Doing book." And what would you say in that conversation?
Ari: "What is your biggest productivity challenge?" And "Let me fix it."
Dean: Absolutely. That's the thing. So you might want to start out ... if I were doing that, I would say, "Hey, here's the book. Welcome aboard. What business are you in?" Start with something that ... I'm looking for five star prospects when that happens, right? People who are willing to engage in the dialogue, friendly and cooperative, they know what they want, they know when they want it, and they'd like us to help them. And they have to be all five. So I start out with, are they willing to engage? I'm not trying to counsel them in a way by saying, "Let me help you." kind of thing. I just want to engage in a dialogue, so I might say to them, "Hey, welcome aboard. What business are you in?" And then-
Dean: Then you might say, "Yeah, boy, as a chiropractor, you must get really busy. What's your biggest productivity challenge?"
Ari: Right.
Dean: And then you're saying the thing. So for Email Mastery, people opt-in. I say, "Hey, what business are you in?" They say, "I'm in this." And I say, "That's great. Have you tried a nine word email yet?" And they'll say yes or no, or, "Yes, I tried it, and this is what happened." Or, "No, I'm reading everything now, I'm going to try it." Or they'll have a question about it and then I can say, "You know what? I'm getting together with some people on Thursday to brainstorm some nine word emails and subject lines. Would you like to join us?" So if you look at that same thing, "What business are you in?" And then, "What's your biggest productivity challenge?" And you say, "You know what? I'm getting together with some people on Thursday to do this, or I did training in our Less Doing group. Would you like to join us?"
Just advancing people on the way up, so that you're starting where they are not trying to convince people, but compelling them, and then offering to collaborate to help them get the benefit that you can help them get, you know?
Ari: Yeah. I just like sitting here listening and thinking how fortunate I am that I have the ability to talk to someone like you, Dean, so.
Dean: It's kind of a cool thing that I think you've got access to people who can run some Facebook test campaigns for you, right? You know how to make that happen.
Ari: Yeah.
Dean: And I think it would be valuable for you to test that out, see if you can get people to download your book for under $5. That would be a great ... if you could do that, to really ramp that up.
Ari: Yeah, for sure.
Dean: Because that adds all the predictability for you. That's what continues to allow your business to grow. You've already got all the behind the scenes stuff. It doesn't change. It doesn't require any more effort if you were to double the size of your list.
Ari: Yeah, well, so my list is about 10,000, and it's kind of been that for probably three years now. A little up, a little down, a little up. But I've never ... like I said, of all the things I've done, I've never done like a real list building strategy.
Dean: Yeah. So this will be the thing. And I think that engagement process of finding people, welcoming them in, and if they're ready right now, that you can move them into the next thing when you say, "Hey, we've got a new boot camp starting up." The same way I do my Email Mastery. I start a new Email Mastery group every month, and so I'm constantly sending out the invitation and then whenever people are ready, they can jump in.
Ari: Yeah. This is gold.
Dean: Gold, gold. So hit me with what you've heard, then, because I think we have a nicely hatched evil scheme for you here.
Ari: Yeah, I agree. So basically, well, one thing is I've been offering them two chapters for free. There's no reason why we shouldn't give them the whole book, for a number of reasons. One of which is that the book is probably the best sales tool that I have anyway, because it tells people exactly what I do and why I do it and how I do it, and they understand it better when they come to me. And it's a gift as well, rather than the two chapters is more like bait, honestly. I didn't see it like that before but now, I do. So that's the main thing as switching over to that as basically as a lead magnet, and then running some ads to get people to opt-in to the list and then the list conversion, I kind of have in place already what you're talking about with, "What is your biggest productivity challenge, and are you still interested with me on your biggest productivity challenge?", is one of my emails.
So I know it works so I just need to get more leads in so having the book offer and then running ads to that offer, which would be pretty cheap since we're looking for opt-ins, not conversions, so ... you laid it out pretty thoroughly. Even if we get a tenth of the value that I'm talking about, it's still a 10 times return, which is-
Dean: That's what I'm saying.
Ari: Kind of ridiculous. I never even thought of it that way.
Dean: Right. So I think you want to do that, just to have that on perpetual. That would be the thing. If we could get you 1,000 opt-ins a month, that's really 30 a day, nearly double your list in the next 12 months, and you've spent at the most $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to do that, but you've generated this asset that's going to continue to yield more and more and more.
Ari: Yeah, absolutely. It's simple but I can see ... you know what I like about this? There's nothing about this that feels like a gamble. This is so clearly obviously the right way to do this.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right, yeah. And you don't feel like you have to be a salesman. You're not trying to be that. Your spirit is giving and that's who you're going to attract.
Ari: Yeah.
Dean: I like that.
Ari: Absolutely. Well, I can't thank you enough. This will all be implemented by the end of the day, I promise you.
Dean: Perfect. I love it. And then keep me posted.
Ari: I don't waste any time here.
Dean: No, why not? You got a whole team of people helping you. You're not going to actually do it, so that's great. You got a whole team. You got some who's to send out on that path. Level 6 automation. Just get it done.
Ari: That's right.
Dean: Set up a Facebook campaign, give away the book, and see if we can get opt-ins for $3 to $5.
Ari: Done and done.
Dean: Done. I love it. Well, you've been a delight. This is good.
Ari: Thank you, Dean. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Miami and hopefully, some people are also interested in seeing you in Miami and they want to come to the event.
Dean: Absolutely. Perfect. Alright, Ari. On your way.
Ari: Thank you, sir.
Dean: Have a great day. Thanks, bye bye.
And there we have it. Another great episode. This one was really, really a powerful episode. I can tell that Ari really got on a deep level everything that we were talking about, and I can't wait to see what will happen because I know that he's going to take action and I think that that model is something that anybody could apply to their business. It's exactly the model that I use, just the way I described it to Ari, and so if I can help you in any way apply this model to your business, that's what we're here for. That's what my organization is set up to do, to help entrepreneurs make more money.
So the things that we talked about today are all things that I can help you implement. We talked about writing a 90 minute book. I've got a whole team of people set up standing by to help you write a book with just 90 minutes of your time, and you can get everything you need to know, see what we are up to, at 90MinuteBook.com. You can get a free copy of the 90-Minute Book and you can see exactly how we help people just like you write books. Then using it as a lead generator, you need the tools to do that. You need a landing page. You need auto responders. You need a CRM to keep notes on everybody so that you can see where people are in the process, and we've got the tools set for you there at GoGoClients.com.
If you've already got a list, you've got people that you are already communicating with, it might be a good thing for you to join me in our Email Mastery academy, where we can spend time one on one hatching, wordsmithing exact emails that you can send to your group. We've got a really great approach to email marketing and there's a whole course and a community at EmailMastery.com that are focused on using email to grow their business. And then if you'd like to just continue you the conversation here, you can go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com. You can download a copy of the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book, and if you click on the "Be a Guest" link, you can be a guest on the show, and we can hatch some evil schemes for you.
So that's it for this week, and I will talk to you next time.