The $1 product challenge. How my guest earned $4,000 in just 10 days without paid ads. What's up? What's up, Nick? Welcome to... The Side Hustle Show, light on the theory, heavy on the tactics. It's an entrepreneurship podcast. You can actually apply. And if you've been around online business for any length of time, I can almost guarantee you've heard the phrase, the money is in the list.
And all the experts, myself included, extol the virtues of building your email list, right? It's the platform that you own and control. You're not at the whim of algorithm updates, social media changes. But the question is, are you building an email list of buyers? Subscribers are great, but... you're not buying groceries on subscribers alone. My guest today has a unique list building and business building strategy that throws free lead magnets out the window in favor of low-priced
products starting at just a dollar and has seen some exciting results, including $4,000 in just 10 days. From growthmodels.co, Pete Boyle, welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. You bet I'm excited for this one. I got to know, what's the $1 product that you came up with? How did this work? Basically, I found myself in a position where I tried a bunch of things in business that didn't quite work out.
As is always the case, you know, you try some new things, it doesn't always work. And I was like, right, I need to get some good positive cash flow coming back in. Went back, tried the usual lead magnet, get people in, tried to nurture them towards buying from me.
somewhere down the line a day or week a month whatever it didn't work and so i was like right i need to actually get some customers coming in and so at that time you know chat gpt was doing huge numbers in terms of the actual you know daily usage And custom GPTs had just come out. But most people weren't really using custom GPTs. They didn't know how to do them. So I sat down over a weekend and I thought, I'm going to figure out how I can create some custom GPTs.
Much like the philosophy that's now in the $1 product challenge, one of the things I wanted to do was create something that was easy for the end user to use. Not like a big load of information, but a quick and easy solution. And I created some custom GPTs that were around content marketing because I spent a lot of my career doing content marketing for different brands. And I said, look, these are four custom GPTs that will help you identify a great topic, create great headline.
do the brief that you need to send to a writer and even help you with the first draft. Four of them, you can get all four for a dollar. Oh, okay. And then, yeah, it kind of spiraled from there because they were so easy to use and people could basically go in, answer a few questions and get. the results that they needed and i kind of daisy changed them along so you could take the output from one into the next to get the next stage and so on and so on okay
So this is rather than starting from coming up with your own series of prompts to get the outcome that you want. It's kind of like a done for you type of pre-setup thing. Yeah, exactly. So it's one of the issues I see now with a lot of the...
AI influencers, for lack of a better term. The lead magnets they're using is like, here's a thousand... ai prompts that you can use and i look at it and i think well that's great but i only need five sure that are really going to be useful for me so you've given me more work
that I'm going to have to go through all 1,000 to find the five that are useful for me. Yeah, I'm sure these are all great, right? But what's most relevant? Exactly. And so I was just like, what if I do that work for you? And I say, right, answer these five questions about your audience, what you want to create content about.
a couple of other sort of clarifying questions and this will just create the end thing like answers that everybody would have okay and that they would have to do anyway with a prompt but i'll take the prompting out of the equation and you can just take it from there And this was right when custom GPTs first came in. So there was a lot of buzz around them. And yeah, I sold all four of those for a dollar. Wow. Okay. So maybe some upfront work for a low ticket price. But then you don't have a...
Do you have an email list? Do you have an audience to speak of at this point? How do you find buyers for this? So I did have an audience at that point and I had my email list and all of this, but I didn't use them to... sell this to i didn't sell this to them okay um they weren't really that interested in content marketing because i had an audience of freelancers who wanted to know how to attract clients okay okay so there's a bit of an overlap there but they weren't the exact
ideal market. What I wanted was I wanted people who were running content for larger brands. So I had to go out and try and find them to get him to buy it. How do you find them? So I did something that I've now called in spear phishing was, um, I found free communities of
you know, content marketers who, you know, they're all in there helping each other. You can't usually go into these places and promote because as soon as you go into a good free community, the moderators are going to be like, no promotion. Yeah, exactly. So I went in and I...
created just value-based posts like i said you know i've been doing this for quite a while so creating these posts wasn't too hard eventually i created another custom gpt that helps me create the posts so to take some of the work out of it but um
Essentially, I go in and I say, look, these are the big problems that I see with content marketing. This is the solution. I've actually created some custom GPTs to help me do this. No promo. It was like a value-based post. Here's the problem. Here's the solution. I've been working on this thing.
just a little tease of what the offer is, then anybody who liked, commented, I'd follow up with in direct messages. So it wasn't a cold DM then. It wasn't like a complete stranger saying, hey, how's it going? I could go in and I could say, You enjoyed the post. Thanks so much for engaging. Yeah, there was some level of interaction. Exactly, exactly. So it's not cold DMs, warm DMs, I guess. And it was, thanks so much. Really enjoyed it. Any questions? And then...
If they were receptive, I would then segue that into a, you know, I put some of those custom Jupities together, I can give you access for a dollar. And that was how I started to get the initial sales coming through. It's not a very scalable system.
because it still requires you to go in and talk to you know in these groups but um it can still work quite well and as long as you focus on value the moderators so far have most of the time like 80 percent of the time not had an issue with it yeah and it if you're listening in you may already be a part of some of these communities so it's not you coming in completely completely cold you kind of know the you know the culture
of these different forums and communities where you know what kind of content is going to fly or what kind of posts are going to fly in there and if you can lead with this. value first the spearfishing is kind of interesting like i don't need everybody in here but you know a handful of people who are interested and it's going to help me validate whether or not there's any legs to this idea yeah and that was the whole thing is you know as you say you're looking for those people
Basically giving you a digital hand raise of saying, yeah, that's cool. I like this comment or likes, and then you can follow it with those. And then, you know, that just made it so much easier when following up with those people and just getting some kind of a result. Okay. So now.
technically are they sending you venmo are they sending you paypal is there like a stripe landing page or like how are you is you figuring out like yeah okay i give you access to these for a dollar okay next next step to
collect and deliver yeah so it's it's one of those things i think a lot of people really overanalyze what they should be doing with this and it's like oh how do i deliver this so it feels like a premium package and all of this sort of stuff for years now i've had a thrive cart subscription
And if you, I don't know if you're familiar with ThriveCut, but it's a checkout software. And so, you know, you pay once for lifetime and it's, I think it's like $500. So no monthly fees, nothing like this. And then it integrates with Stripe or PayPal, but you can set up a nice looking. cart checkout quite simple and so i set it up there and basically then i said anybody who buys this send them to this thank you page which then has the links to the
get them here. Very, very simple, very low tech. You could do the same with a Stripe checkout, I think, or even a PayPal page. Once you have payment, you just send them the links to the custom GPTs. Okay, got it. Thanks for sharing that. How many people bought the $1 thing? I think it was 26. Okay.
And so the manual in these different communities, groups, right? So it's got the people who might be interested in this thing leads to the direct message outreach to the digital hand raisers, the people who engaged with that content. And then a percentage of those people click through to buy the thing. So now you got...
A grand total of $26 minus processing fees. Exactly. So that's still not going to make much of a business out of this. What happens next? It's kind of the, how do you lead people up the value chain to buying more from you or doing more business with you?
This is where Thrivecart kind of helped out. And there's plenty of other tools that you can do this with as well. A lot of them are termed as like funnel building tools, but also any of the good cart checkouts. If you look to see if they allow you to create a bump offer and upsell offers, one-click upsells.
because that massively reduces the friction. And basically what this allows you to do is add other products onto the checkout so that somebody then has the option to go, oh, you know, I also want this. Yeah, I'll take that as well. And I basically...
built a couple of extra products that I added onto the $1 product on the front. The way that I always view this is the $1 product or the front end, the first thing that they buy is there to help them achieve a quick solution. Don't give them this massive
big thing of information that they're going to have to sort through and figure out how to use. Give them something that they can take and just put into their business or take and use and get a very quick result because that's much easier to sell. Use this. It takes five minutes. You get this result. Very easy to sell compared to some of the other things out there. The bump offer, when they go to the checkout, there'll be a little checkbox that says, do you also want this?
And that bump offer should be there to add extra value to the initial offer. And I like to think that it's going to help people achieve the result faster, easier, cheaper, or more profitably. So it's going to make getting the result from what you're just selling them for $1. faster easier cheaper or it's going to help them get a bigger result
Okay, the extra value of the bump offer, so the, you know, would you like fries with that kind of thing, except in a business? Similar to, yeah, I like to think of it as like a catalyst to help them get better results. And so in that case... I then recorded a couple of videos of myself building custom GPTs. And I put a basic template of how I did the description into the custom GPT because you give it a custom description that it follows that process.
So I gave them that template and a couple of videos around it. And I said, you know, for an extra, I think $47 is what I usually go for, for a bump. You can also get the whole system that I've built on how to do these so that you can create not just leads for content marketing.
But for any repetitive task in your business, you can teach an AI agent how to handle it for you. And you just follow this. Okay. So like the how-to tutorials, the instruction manual, plus if you ever want to do this on your own, here's how I set this up. Exactly. Yeah.
is like the first page that they'll see when they go to buy. They'll be filling out their payment details for the $1 product. And then just before they can click go through, it'll be like, do you also want this? It'll teach you how to do this. And it's like, oh, great. And then essentially...
When you've sold them that initial product, you've solved a problem in their life and you've given them this solution and you've moved them from where they are today to that transformation of where they want to be after that product. that new area, that new sort of reality that they have, they now have a new problem. And so I then offer them an upsell, which helps them.
solve the new problem so it's a solution to that new problem that they experience and so in this case we're talking that they have custom gpt that will help them create content and then we got something that will help them create their own custom gpts but they have a new problem now that they're going to have this content
Is it optimized? How do they promote it? How do they actually get sales from that? So then the upsell was more information on how they can turn one piece of content into like a sales machine so that people who read that piece of content will actually buy.
rather than just producing content and seeing no tangible results from it. Okay, so that's no shortage of content or digital clutter on the internet, but how do you actually get results from that? So that's the upsell offer. Do you remember what? that was priced at? I want to say it was 97 or 197. And I only had maybe a handful of people take that. It wasn't like a huge number of people.
But I was 97 or 197 because that's usually the numbers that I'll go for is the initial product will be anything from, you know, I always start these at $1 because it's a very low barrier to entry and just beginning thinking on a transactional relationship with the person. changes the rest of your relationship with them. It's buyers versus freebie seekers. But it's usually $1, then $47 for the bump, then $97 to $197 for the upsell is what I tend to go for. And that gives you potentially $250.
In all digital, you know, no direct time required on your part to deliver this good. It's not like people are signing up for coaching or consulting yet. Not yet. Nope. So this was all just something that I've created and it was loom videos. So pretty low tech in terms of, you know, there was no lots of editing and like flashy things. It was me sat in this very chair.
doing a screen share. It's like, go here, this is how I do it. These are the templates. This is why it works. Very, very low tech sort of approach. It took me maybe an hour to create the bump and the upsell together. And then once I created them, I could sell them.
dozens and dozens of times okay interesting this is like i'm starting to piece together you almost have to start with what you know i don't know what would you recommend people start to like start peeling out different segments of their
knowledge and expertise or like what you know how to think about these different tiers as different offers like it's really interesting i would always start with the the end customer like who is it that you're trying to sell to and figure out what are their problems that you can solve so they they have
varies but everybody has problems in their life what are the problem for your ideal customer that you consult that's where i'd start and usually if we're talking about sort of business offers whether it's services coaching courses there'll be one
primary offer that will take somebody from where they are today to that end transformation of where they want to be. And that might be earning a set amount of money, having x percent freedom or whatever it might be the one dollar product needs to eventually lead into that big thing because if there's no direct line between the first purchase and the big purchase yeah
I see what a lot of people do with their low ticket offers is they sell the equivalent of like, oh look, here's some stuff for blue shoes. And then their primary offer is yellow t-shirts. And it's like the person who wants blue shoes doesn't care about yellow t-shirts. So there has to be like a direct line.
More with Pete in just a moment, including the small percentage of customers that make up the majority of your income and why you want to validate your funnel sequence with free traffic before you try ads right after this. In my case, what I could help people with was content marketing. And I had a course at the time, which was the content marketing model. And that's how I built whole content marketing systems.
going to be the end thing for this. And so I had to go back. What would be the very first thing that I could do that would be very small and help somebody solve the initial problem that's stopping them getting from where they are to that big transformation of where they want to be? I just want to help them take that first step. Got it. That's what the initial $1 product should be. Then the bump offer is the catalyst to help them achieve that faster, easier, cheaper. The upsell.
is the next problem that they have. And then that all qualifies them for whatever the bigger piece is that you're going to sell them down the line. What was that in your case? Because it doesn't even stop with the upsell. It's like there's still more. It harkens back to the 80-20 sales and marketing. For everybody who buys this thing.
a percentage would buy something 10 times more expensive, and then a percentage of those people would buy something 10 times more expensive. So what was it in your case? Yeah. I email my email list every single day, and I'm always keeping in touch with them. And this was going to be...
And the way that I built things now is there'd be an automated thing on the back end where it then drip feeds them information for whatever the big offer was. And as I said, I was going to push them towards it was a thousand dollar course, which was the content marketing model. At the time, I thought that...
things wouldn't take off so quickly. I didn't think that I'd see sales initially. I was just testing things. So I didn't have everything ready for that. And so I started emailing people and I was like, if you'd like some help, let me know. And essentially somebody reached out and they were like,
It seems like you know what you're doing. Can you help us? And closed, I think it was like a three grand short term consulting gig with this brand. They just reached out and said, when can you start? And I said, yeah, I can come in. And it was very...
Low effort for me because it was more like a coaching rather than me doing the work. So I would come in, help their team. But that was what it became in that short term. And that's why in those 10 days, they went from buying a $1 product to hiring me for $3,000. Isn't that crazy? That's just like such an interesting sequence of events or of sales funnel, so to speak, from strangers to building up trust and authority and credibility to get somebody to pay you three grand.
Yeah, I think it's that difference between starting off on a transactional versus a non-transactional relationship. The way I look at it is if somebody is willing to pay even a dollar, they have a pain that they're actively trying to solve.
And I always term it as in it's the difference between people who think information and the solution is nice to have. And what they do is they collect it, they put it in like a Google Drive folder, and they're like, I'll come back to that in a week. And people who think that the information and the solution that you have is something they need to have.
If they're willing to pay even a dollar, they need the solution, which means they're going to be more receptive to more help to help them get that solution and the transformation faster. We've heard this phrased in a few different ways. People who pay, pay attention.
In a lot of ways, it's easier to take somebody when this was the example of Fiverr, you know, his line was it's easier to take somebody from $5 to $10,000 than it is to take somebody from zero to five. It's like that initial transaction. hurdle like i gotta bring in my credit card i gotta pay for something like it's it's a much bigger
burden of proof to get somebody to pay you even a dollar than it is to sell them more stuff once you have built that trust. Yeah, 100%. The way that I view it is the $1 product is little more than a filter for those who are serious. because everybody's collecting these big email lists. And I've worked with people who have got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, but they're not.
making the revenue that they should from that audience because there are those people like you said who want to go from five dollars to ten thousand dollars and spend but when you've got so many people who just want free stuff it's very hard to identify
who they are. And that whole argument of signals versus noise, it's very difficult to find when you've just attracted the freebie seekers. So I just view the $1 products as a filter for those who are serious, and then I can continue to serve and help those people achieve their goals.
Yeah, and in your mind, the days of the e-book or the five-day email course or challenge, that stuff is kind of that's just like more information versus you know if i'm charging for a thing it's almost got to be like you said this custom gpt like something that people can implement right away i'm curious you're
your structure or like what what might make sense for that intro offer i think any format can work and it's really depending on what who it is that you're working or targeting to work with and how you're trying to bring them in but i know guys who are using this with like ebooks And they're charging for the e-books, so not the free e-books. It still works. I know people who are running little challenges. The difficulty that you have with both e-books and challenges and courses is consumption.
Because it's great having somebody pay a dollar, but you need them to actually go and consume it and use the thing to then make the high-ticket stuff really viable when you're talking about... nurturing them post-purchase um but i don't think there's any one thing that is like doesn't work i think the difference is whether or not you're giving it away for free or charging for it because that payment is what filters the serious people okay
Is there any thought to what competitors are doing? Do you find that people are like shopping around, so to speak, for this like a dollar thing where it's like, well, other people are offering this for free. So why should I pay you? So I've not had any sort of pushbacks with anything like this. And yeah, I've not seen it, I guess.
There is a thing where when you're trying to sell something, you do probably have to put a little bit more effort into the marketing to make it feel a bit more premium. One thing that I'm always very confident in is that anything that I sell, I'd know.
The quality of the information and the solution inside is good. It works. It's always tested. So I'm not worried about somebody not getting their money back. What I always try and do is make sure that they get at least two times value of what they've paid.
Because then nobody can ever come back and be like, oh, that wasn't worth the money. With a $1 product, you're looking more at like 100 times the value because nobody wants to put you. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to imagine to be like, can I get a refund on this? This was not worth it all. Exactly.
Yeah. One of the things that I realized when I did the custom GPTs is you needed a chat GPT pro account to actually be able to use them. And I put that on the sales page. One person didn't notice it. They emailed me like, I can't use these. And I was like, I'm happy to give you a refund. They were like,
That's fine. But yeah, no one's going to ask for a refund for a dollar, even if it's terrible. But last week or the week before, I actually bought somebody who's doing a similar thing with $3 as a product. The quality of the information inside was really quite lackluster. And as a result, when they then started to put me into their email sequences to pitch me the higher ticket things, I had no trust in them.
When I'm doing the $1 products, I like to offer at least like $100 worth of value for the $1 because this is the first touch point of this relationship. If I start off on a bad foot, if I charge them a dollar and it's terrible. I'm not going to be able to charge them a hundred dollars a thousand dollars down the line.
It still has to be of a high quality. Yeah, I'm with you. It's like the first, it's like that free sample. It's got to be good where the $1 sample, like it's got to be enticing enough to build that trust and say, yeah, this guy is worth doing business with. Exactly. And my thought is if you can give me a dollar and I...
give you a hundred dollars worth of value back when i turn around and i say this thing's like a hundred dollars you're gonna say how good is this thing gonna be it's gonna be amazing right right This is helpful. If I'm pausing, it's because I'm trying to map out like what, you know, what the sequence might look like. Are you still selling this sequence or still selling this product? Are you kind of migrated to something else? Are you still going active in these communities?
At a certain point, we've heard of people doing like a self-liquidating offer, like trying to drive advertising traffic through Facebook or Instagram or whatever, like to the $1 thing. And then, you know. at least pay for the ad costs you do anything like that 100 yeah so the the initial offer i'm not running anymore because it's it's obsolete now ai's got a much better point than it was
that you don't really need the custom GPTs for what I was doing it for. It's gone through several iterations since I was selling this, and really I don't think there's much value in the custom GPTs that I had built for those things. I still use a lot of custom GPTs in my community with people based around templates that we know that works. But yeah, not using that offer, still using very low ticket offers. And I still begin them all at $1.
And I still go out and I start spearfishing in communities where there are people who are interested in this just to try and get a feel. Because I think the problem that a lot of people have and the mistake that they make is they think ads are... A cure-all is like a silver bullet. If you just run ads, you'll make sales. Ads, in my opinion and experience, are a catalyst. Again, they're fuel to the fire.
You need to be able to sell one of something, then you should be able to sell 10 of it. If you can sell 10 to 100 of that thing, Ad will then help you sell 100 to 1,000. Okay.
Most people don't have the money to throw at ads to them to find out if something works to lose thousands of dollars. So I want to go out and I want to see if this will sell without... having to put money behind it and then i'll put money behind it so yeah still running one dollar products and then what happens is once you start running ads you're going to have to play with the prices a bit to try and get sure to make sure that the average order value beats the cost per acquisition on ads
So I'm running my own ads now for the $1 product challenge. Oh, okay. It's very meta, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's all very dependent upon making sure that when they come through that initial funnel, they at least... break even with the acquisition cost so yeah you do have to play around with it but it's it's just the easiest way to scale because doing the spearfishing is great but it's it's difficult to scale after a certain point
Yeah, it's manual outreach. I mean, it's time consuming versus something that you just have sales coming your way. And I like this idea of validate it first, make sure somebody is going to order it, get those first 10, 20 people to.
to buy it from this manual effort before trying to automate the thing and then making sure those ad costs are in line what do you see i guess it you know varies you know the cart value it the cool thing is you know right away like because of the sequences you know it's like the order bump and the upsell like
you get a pretty good sense of, well, what's the conversion rate going to be? What's the average cart value going to be? It's not like this three-month lead time to make a sale. Yeah, so you can... generally find out quite quickly as long as you can drive the traffic to it through spear phishing or ads or whatever you can find out quite quickly whether or not things are working um and like i say then it's just playing around with whether the offers are right to get the you know
right conversion rates on the bump offers and the upsells and also the front end products. And then also playing around with the price to find this sweet spot. Do you have a rule of thumb on average order value that you shoot for or conversion rate or cost to acquire a customer? Any of those metrics that people should keep in mind? It's very different depending on the industry. So obviously...
Me selling this, I'm in one of the more competitive industries for, you know, biz op, as it's, you know, often called. So like, you know, the sort of make money online type stuff, it's very competitive up there with finance, legal, all of these things. So currently for me, my cost per acquisition is around 35.
dollars to forty dollars it kind of fluctuates between those two so if i'm paying for ads i'm going to be paying 35 to 40 bucks just to get a customer i worked with a guy who was a sports psychologist and we were getting customers for him at five dollars
Like it was a much lesser fee because very, very specific to a specific industry of sports psychology. There's somebody in my community and they're running a pure $1 product funnel where it's just $1 products that they're selling on the front end, language learning.
And again, far cheaper, but they're also targeting markets where it is cheaper ad spend. I'm targeting the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. They're teaching English and so they're targeting places that are... cheaper for ad costs so their costs are low so it's really difficult to say this is what you should be aiming for the golden rule is just that you try and have to make the average order value better than the cpa and that's going to fluctuate so much depending on
the industry, the offer, the audience, all of these things. Okay, got it. So collect that data up front and through this manual method or through your own traffic channels before. turning on the ads because it's a good way to go backwards in a hurry if you can't recoup those costs. Now, it is important to know this is kind of like upfront, like where I may need to break even or make a small profit on this initial ad spend. But then I've got...
this list of buyers that can hire me for consulting they can buy my higher ticket stuff like it's an engaged group who hopefully has some trust in what you're doing and can continue to do business with you down the road exactly and we found People who will spend even a dollar are up to around 12 times more likely to buy other programs, offers, services from you again than if they came through from free leads.
So you're going to get 12 times more sales by focusing on these people than you would on people who just want information because it's nice to have. And that's even if it's just a single dollar rather than like a $27 or $47 front end. Got it. Anything that we missed on the $1 product challenge? I like this stuff. Yeah, I don't think so. I think breakeven is good. If you can make even a small profit, it's better. And it is, you know, figuring out, it's a lot of testing between the offers.
to really get that right but as you mentioned running straight into do ads is fine if you have the capital to burn because i know guys who will just throw ten thousand dollars an ad campaign to see if they can make money back and they'll find the messaging because they'll test heavily a lot of people don't have that money so test manually first and then once it's working use ads to kind of scale that reach right
No, that makes a lot of sense. So growthmodels.co slash dollar. You can learn more about the $1 product challenge over there. We're going to be right back with Pete, including round two, donate a business idea. right after this. All right, we're back with Pete Boyle from growthmodels.co. Round one was the $1 product challenge. Round two is donate a business idea. This is something that you might start yourself if you had more time. This is something that you think listeners could run with.
to exist in the world. What have you got for us here? I'm going to go through something that's very self-serving. One of the things that I'm really working on with my business is how to increase the reach and how to attract more buyers. Obviously ads are great for this, but I do a lot of email marketing and there are lots of tools out there that will allow you to do newsletter exchanges. And there's tools like, you know, I could name a couple of them where it's like, hey.
You've got an email newsletter that's a similar size as I do. Let's exchange newsletters. Let's see if my subscribers want to become your subscribers. There's also ones out there that will allow you to find ones to sponsor. What I'm really looking for is... ways that I can find affiliate marketers who have engaged email lists that could be validated in some way so that then I could approach those affiliate marketers and say, look, I have this offer.
You know, affiliate marketing is a great way if you have the right overlap of audiences to reach a new audience. I'll give you 50% of all of the sales if you can promote this to your audience and all of this. Because when I'm working with affiliates in the past, you attract a lot of them.
5% of them will drive 95% of the sales. Some of them will come through and they'll turn out that they don't have a good list in terms of engagement or that it's just the wrong audience. So it'd be great if there was some kind of directory. of good vetted affiliate marketers who are promoting people's offers and are willing to do co-promotions and all of this sort of stuff and had a method that you could directly outreach to those people.
Okay. So that's the business idea directory of essentially affiliate marketing email lists. Yeah. And like there's things where it's similar to this, but not quite. There's, you know, places where you can find newsletters for sponsorships. But of course, a sponsorship is just usually one email.
a static piece of text or a static image, which is fine. Yeah. When I've been an affiliate for people and when I've had affiliates who do the best for me, what we tend to do is we build a full sequence and we run it on the same kind of process where it's, you know, same.
concept of spearfishing we do a digital hand raise who's interested in this people who say that they're interested in this they then get like a five or a ten day promotion of the other offer that way you don't annoy your email list but you tend to get much higher sales
than just a sponsorship in somebody's newsletter. No, that makes sense. Do you know Matt McWilliams? I do not. Matt, I think it's theaffiliateguy.com. Anyways, Matt's been on the show before. He's been in the affiliate space for a decade.
plus and he kind of coordinates these types of launch you know geared toward product you know big online business celebrity type of product launches and you know on the affiliate recruiting side is especially so he may have something like this internal to his company of this this kind a database where he could go work with on the directory side we did an episode late last year with john rush episode 647 i want to say in in the podcast archives where he talks all about building
these types of directory websites where you're pulling in the data and that's the value add is the data and in this case it could be a number of subscribers you know industry that they reach you know how long they've been in business like different data points that you could have and i don't know maybe there's some
business where you take a percentage of a percentage of an affiliate i don't know how you would necessarily monetize it or maybe you charge for access to it because it's like you know there's obviously some money to be made on the other side but this would be um
an interesting one to run with. There's things that are close to it. And even like, you know, ConvertKit now, I use ConvertKit from email service where they have a thing where it's like the creator network and you can go and find other creators. But it doesn't tell you the size of their list, how engaged their list are, how often they email. You kind of have to manually do all of that. And then you have to manually go and find their email address to reach out to people.
and it's like oh you know it's a lot of extra manual work and i'm like there's there's a simpler solution somewhere yeah but it's the manual work that leads to conversations like this because it was one of those you sent me a cold email it was like hey i've got this thing called the one dollar product you want to promote it it's like well i'll learn a little bit more about this it's like hey this is kind of interesting and now we got to do a whole
it so there's there's pros and cons to it sounds like you need a um evertool assistant to do some of this initial research and outreach for you that's the thing yeah and i'm you know there's part of me which is thinking if i get somebody in to help almost as an affiliate partner
If we can just chronicle people that we find who are up for it, get their approval, we could maybe create this. Because I know certain tools as well, they started off literally with this as a similar thing, but for newsletter promos. There's a guy that I know who did this.
started it off as an air table and eventually sold the business so and that was it was just finding newsletters pulling all the stats for co-promotions uh doing intros between people and then it became a an acquisition for somebody else like somebody came along to acquire the business yeah this would be no no no the more we talk about it the more i think like yeah this is super valuable because there's going to be there's always going to be people
offers. So there's always going to be people with email lists who need those offers to monetize their business and help their audience. So it makes sense. In fact, can we go back and come up with another idea? Can we just do this one ourselves? Yeah, maybe so.
You got anything else? You got another idea you want to toss out? Yeah, I'm going to have to come up with one quickly. But I think, personally, I would find this as quite a valuable idea if somebody would create that. It's definitely something I would be... interested in testing yeah there's definitely something here because there is like you said there's the matchmakers for the
email newsletter sponsorships, the exchange. Do you have this newsletter exchange, like promo swap type of database? Do you have a resource that you like on that front? That's an interesting one. Letter growth. is one and i believe that i think beehive has one that's kind of built in i'm not sure i don't use beehive and like i said convertkit also has one where you can recommend one another
And basically when somebody subscribes your email list, it throws up a pop-up and it says, hey, these are my friends. You should also consider subscribing to these guys. And then there's a paid version where it's a spark loop. which integrates with a lot of these tools and you can use them to basically say, anybody who sends me a subscriber, I'll send them $1, $2, $5 per subscriber. If you're going to do that, it's very important to know.
your payback periods and the average customer lifetime value so that you know you're not going to get into trouble by spending yeah five dollars per subscriber and then actually they only pay you on average three dollars back yeah yeah we could go backwards on that math but oh there's there's something to this
matchmaker model and we've seen it in sites like podcastguests.com like how do we match people who have podcasts with people who need guests with people who want to guest on podcasts and even like help a reporter you know journalists who need sources and sources who want to get some press. So there's definitely some precedence for it. So I like this one. We'll call this the affiliate marketing email database business idea. There we go.
All right, that is round two. Round three is what we call the triple threat. And the first part of this is a marketing tactic that is working right now. One dollar products. Yeah, one thing, I mean... that's working right now that I'm really trying to do more of is YouTube. I think YouTube is one of the better tools that people aren't using as much as they should.
And the reason that I really like YouTube is there is a great balance between both paid and organic on the same platform. And so you could probably get compounding gains. And that's one thing that we're trying to really look at is how you can use paid to... accelerate the organic growth or vice versa um with like retargeting audiences and all of this sort of thing but i don't i see a lot of people who are jumping into still things like facebook ads and i'm running facebook ads
But I think YouTube really is a better long-term opportunity. Interesting. You see a lower cost of acquisition there? Not so much yet, because I'm still really getting to grips with the advertising. And I think that's probably... my shortcoming that i'm not seeing as good as cpa i'm seeing much cheaper click-through rates and all of this sort of stuff but i think as well as we move towards more ai content having real people
on camera is one of the things that is at the minute harder for ai to sort of recreate and so as most selling is done based on trust and based you know people buy from people yeah having a face to the brand really seems to be working quite well, even with smaller audiences. I know guys with 2,000 subscribers who are pulling good money because they're not relying on YouTube's ad revenue, but they're using it as a way to bring them.
course customers coaching clients that kind of stuff yeah what's a typical call to action for you on a on a youtube video or an example of a video that's done well again this is one thing that i am currently figuring out i am about 17 days into a test i'm doing i run a lot of my little experiments where i'm trying to publish one long form youtube video per day about 10 minutes each so i'm about 17 days maybe
into doing one video per day okay and so i'm happy to check back in and say what worked and what didn't uh what i've tried as well is a method similar to the spearfishing approach where basically i pick some of my top performing videos put money behind them to reach the audience and then retarget those people with a conversion focused ad because you can get reasonable reach for quite cheap on youtube
And then basically if I know somebody watches the video, they engage with it, they click on the thumbnail. If I then hit them with a conversion focus, I'd like, hey, this system will help you attract buyers, not freebie seekers. Check it out over here.
That's one thing that I'm sort of working on really just nailing down at the minute. No, okay. This is the kind of nitty gritty stuff that I totally love geeking out on. So organic video, long form content, which is naturally going to rise to the top. put some money to boost that, promote that video to a broader audience, send it out to the world.
And then retargeting those. Hey, you watch this thing. And then if you're serious about this, this is the call to action related video where it's like, and now go buy the $1 thing. And now you're into my sequence. Exactly. Yeah. And at the same time, what I'm doing is people who buy.
The $1 product challenge, obviously I have other offers that are the primary profit drivers. Now I want to get people into them. Again, people buy from people. If I can get them to consume and get a result from the $1 product challenge, they're primed to buy the next stuff.
But people buy from people. So I've recorded YouTube videos that help coach people through those next stages as well. So that's why I think YouTube is way more sort of flexible than a lot of other channels. And at the same time...
I could keep going for hours on this. I'm sorry. This is going to be a long one. But one thing that I've been doing as well is trying to figure out how you can be, you know, there's the whole concept of omnipresent marketing. People log into Facebook. They see you. They're on LinkedIn. They see you.
It's very difficult to do that because it's so much content to produce. If I can produce one 10-minute video, I use a tool which then separates that into seven or eight different short videos for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, LinkedIn. I can then have AI take the transcript and turn that into a couple of different social posts. And so that's another thing that I've been playing around with is as I'm recording one of these long form videos every day.
One long-form video is becoming five to ten shorts. It's becoming five social posts, text posts. Those shorts and text posts can be used across Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram.
Is there a specific tool that you're using for that? Because that's the next question, a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. Yeah, so the tool that I'm really relying on at the minute is, I don't know whether it's... descript or descript i don't know how they want you to pronounce it but descript d-e-s-c-r-i-p-t yeah and it's um you know i picked it because i hate video editing i'm no good at it
It takes up too much time. And this, it transcribes the video. And if there's a piece of the video you don't like, you just cut the words from the transcription and it'll edit it out of the video for you. So much easier. They have an AI tool built in where it's like, hey, create some clips. You give it some prompts about what kind of clips you want. You go away for three minutes, you come back.
your clips are ready. Oh, I didn't know they had that because we use, we use Descript or my, my video editor uses Descript for the video editing stuff too. And it's like the first time you use it, it's like just this amazing experience of like, I could just edit the transcript versus like having to find that specific timestamp. video and drag the thing over here no it's really really cool and then yeah it's underlord you know it's at the top in the top right corner of the um
of the sidebar on the right-hand side at Underlord, and then scroll down about two-thirds of the way. There's a bit which says Create Clips, and it'll do all of that for you. You can pick a template so that it designs it well, and then it will just export them all into that template. You have to double-check them. because sometimes the clips are no good. But, you know, it's the fastest way that I've found to do clips. And then I'm using socialbee.com, I think.
Basically what that allows me to do. So yesterday I exported 15 shorts and I was like, this is going to take a long time for me to schedule this. Social B allows you to set up queues. So at 1pm every day, share a short to these. platforms and then i just upload 15 shorts give them the title and it adds them to the queue and i don't actually have to manually schedule anything out okay
Socialbee.com. That's a new one. We'll link both of those up. Descript and Socialbee, other tools that you mentioned in the call, Thrivecart, Loom, ConvertKit, Beehive, lots of different tools at your disposal. So we'll link up all of those. in the show notes for this episode. The last question of the triple threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months. So it's maybe not my favorite book from the last 12 months, but as I mentioned, I'm really trying to get better at YouTube.
And what I found is headline thumbnail are really important for getting people to engage with the video. And the first 30 seconds are really important to get people invested. And so I've been rereading a book called Great Leads. which is a direct response marketing book about how to start sales messages. This is from guys who would write 10,000, 20,000 word sales letters.
And this book is all about how to open them up and the different ways that you can do it to hook engagement and hook curiosity from people to get them to want to read the rest. So you grab that attention early. So that's one thing that I've been rereading in an attempt. to see if I can port any of that information over to video. Okay, great leads, a direct response marketing book. We will link that one up as well. That's new to me. Again,
You can find Pete at growthmodels.co. Growthmodels.co slash dollar is the place to start your one dollar. product challenge. Big thanks to Pete for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest. offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me.
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