M: All right.

For some reason, a thousand people is considered the holy grail, okay. Once you've got a thousand people, the next thousand is easier. It's really important that throughout the whole process, you remember that you should be finding an audience and then delivering products for that audience, rather than finding an audience for those products. They sound very very similar, but the big problem we encountered right from the beginning with websites is, we were trying to drag people back to buying a website as opposed to helping them achieve something in their before after grid, and then talking and saying look, if you're serious about this, a website is going to be what helps you out next.

The real basic steps: traffic, content, lead magnet. I'm not going to do splinter products or anything like that yet. This is proper 101 stuff, and relatively autopiloted. I'm going to ignore traffic at the moment.

Content: you want realistically between five and ten genuinely epic awesome fantastic blog posts. Now, those are related to your before after grid. Do you have your "before after grid" there?

J: I do.

M: Could you give me something on the have and feel? Before and after on have and feel?

J: Before and after on the feel. Let's pick a good one. Let's go for, "confused by the woolly nature of marketing and how it actually adds value."

M: Okay.

I'll split this. There are content types, and the four easiest ones to produce are list posts, got them written down here, how-to posts, here we go, killer posts, and aggregator. If you double that, that's eight, basically. We then take our before and after grid, and we think about, well, how do they feel beforehand, is how marketing adds value. That would be along the lines of like, a problem based headline. We come up with genuinely useful headlines that tick off a load of boxes. They have the key words that we want to be known for in the title. They're easily understood. All this kind of stuff, right?

For example, if we were going to take this one here, for the before after, I would say ... What's the after one, then?

J: The after one is, confident that they understand exactly how branding and marketing can make their business more successful.

M: Right, perfect, okay. We're going to write a how to guide that takes people from this status to the after one, which is, confident that they've got an epic marketing plan that does what?

J: That's basically that they understand how ...

M: Okay, well, the big benefit that they'll want from that is, I don't know, generates them more leads, or something. What word, I don't know, to your thing.

J: Yeah, probably the, yeah, generate more lead is fine.

M: Yeah, just for example.

We take the how to guide format, we add it to one of the before and after things, we come up with some kind of title, and it's How to, dot dot dot, confident that you've got an epic marketing plan that will generate you more leads. That needs work, but ultimately that's the title. We do that five to ten times for each one of these types. These are the easiest types of blog posts to write, which is why we do it like this. There are other styles, like interviews and shit like that.

There's a whole saying which is, if you need to give away the cow, and if you don't know how to give away the cow, give away the farm. Give away so much value, not just content you're writing for the sake of it but so much value that people are surprised that they're not paying for it, basically. That's how high quality these posts need to be.

J: Okay.

M: Examples, and these are all free. These are open. These are just the blog posts. Okay?

J: Okay.

M: Even if we only have one, it takes us a couple of months to write one, that's absolutely fine. Okay?

J: Yep.

M: Fantastic. So that's that.

We then, on that blog post, have a bunch of opt-ins, from Opt-In Monster or Ice Gram or however we use it, that offer the content upgrade or the lead magnet for that particular post. Some people absolutely love welcome mats and full screen stuff. Personally I don't. I prefer having them at the bottom of the post, in side bars, halfway through the post. All we try and do is remember, if you're serious about, dot dot dot ... Bringing it back to this one here, if you're serious about writing an epic marketing plan that you're confident in and that will generate you more leads, you need to, and that's where we say download our lead magnet. We can't call it a lead magnet, of course, we call it something like our cheat sheet, or the marketing plan template, or whatever it is.

J: Yeah.

M: It's kind of like saying, well, I'm going to teach you how to write, I'm going to teach you how to design a house. I'm going to teach you every single step of how to design the house. After you've learned that, you go, okay, if you're serious about that, download our house building template, which is five different house styles that you could then just fill in the blocks for. It's kind of like saying, well, the faster option, you've read all this, you know how to do it now and you make this super high quality, you've read all that. This is the next step. We've made it easier for you. Download this template. Download this guide. Download this lead magnet. Again, we don't call it that. E-books don't work that well as a phrase anymore, apparently. Things like cheat sheets do. Templates. Guides. Webinar recordings. Yeah. Basically that's where we then lead into the lead magnet.

We do this, ideally once a month, right?

J: Okay.

M: It's terrifying publishing your first post because it's not going to get any traction. That's the reality. Your first post is probably going to be pretty shitty, but there's nothing you can do about that, you just have to get it out there. Once it's out there, we can then go to things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and get a bunch of crazy cheap traffic. Here's what's interesting: in the old days, I say the old days, a few years ago, we used to send people directly to a landing page. That's become really expensive now. That's fine, if you want to pay two, three, four pounds per lead, then that's great, that's fine. We do still send people to landing pages, but at a later state, in remarketing. Right at the beginning, we do this, we have our content, it's free content, which show people how to do it, and we say to them, we say to Facebook, going through to this blog post, so we're sending traffic to bloggers, which is way, way cheaper. We're talking like 5 p a click kind of cheap.

The funny thing with Facebook and all this kind of stuff is, the lower the price, the better the advert copy is to the blog copy. The closer they are. Congruency. If you said, for example, we're going to show you how to write an epic marketing plan that will get you more leads, and then on Facebook you also wrote that, your cost would be lower because it's congruent between the two. If I said, how to be confident in your marketing plan on Facebook and then it went through to a post that said, how to write a marketing plan that gets you more leads, it's the same thing, you know it is, but even those two small differences could make a bit of a difference to the pricing. They need to be really, really specifically similar.

J: Okay.

M: We then drive the traffic back, and our opt-in programs, like Opt-In Monster or Ice Gram, they start picking up those leads.

J: Okay.

M: That's what builds us to a thousand.

Ideally, across this five to ten, let's say this lead magnet is our marketing plan template. Or something, even if it's how to write a mission statement. One of our best performing ones is a two-sentence email template on how to convert someone who's kind of on the edge of a sale. People love it, because it's two sentences, really really quick to digest and consume, they don't have these massive, long, huge project sheets, or anything like that. One A4 page, there's tons of stuff out there on lead magnets. The idea is, out of all of this stuff, and we have this bunch of different topics, maybe one, two, three, four, will go into one lead magnet, one, two, three, will go into another lead magnet, and the rest will go into a third lead magnet. You only need to have, you know, three lead magnets, or two lead magnets. There's no reason why you can't use the same lead magnet across various posts.

In an ideal world, you'd have a very specific lead magnet per blog post. That's what you'd ideally have. To start with, I would try and write between four or five posts for one lead magnet, and then move on to the other, and start bulking them out like that. The programs themselves are smart enough for you to be able to say, just load them on these types of pages, just load them on these types of pages. This is what you're going to start doing, is writing genuinely useful awesome blog posts.

List posts are really easy, for example, like ... What's an after for status, for example?

J: After for status. Well-known and respected brand, big name in the market.

M: What was their before?

J: Invisible to their market, unrecognizable brand.

M: A list post could be, seven examples of brands that have gone from invisible to their market to best known within their industry.

J: Oh, okay.

M: There's tons of examples of that one, for example. That's really easy: you just do the logo, their name, a link to them, write a little bit about their journey and what they did, bosh, bosh, bosh, bosh, bosh. It speaks to their status, because they go oh, fuck, I feel invisible and I want to go out there. That's in your before after grid. The lead magnet for something like that could again be the marketing plan, or it could be the cheat sheet on how to take your brand from invisible to well known. That's basically how you build that up.

J: Okay. So you have five to ten blog posts.

M: In an ideal world, you'd be publishing one a day.

J: Yeah.

M: The reality is, we don't have that kind of time. The majority of people find their leads come from about five to ten blog posts, realistically. That's usually because they're specific to the lead magnet that they're promoting. For example, social media examiner, who are incredible, they have something like two hundred and fifty thousand people on their list, the irony is, actually, they don't have a lot of congruency between some of their posts and the lead magnet they're trying to put forward. They're completely unrelated, because they've got so much content. On the other side, if you're really specific about what it is that you do and what you're offering, you can write a lot less content.

It's all about sharing and promoting it. Once you've got this here, that's the machine automates itself, you can then look at other methods of getting traffic. You could do email list drops, for example. An email list drop is where you say to someone who has got a similar audience, hey, we just wrote this blog post on five brands that went from invisible to best known in their market, we think you'll enjoy it, why don't you share it with your guys? It's as simple as that.

People do do it, they're looking for content to share out, people are, on their newsletters. If you did a killer post, for example, which is basically a sales letter blog post and lead magnet all in one post, and then a further lead magnet, that's basically a killer post. They typically run from like, five to ten thousand words long.

J: Okay. Sales letter ...

M: Sales letter, then a regular blog post, like a how to guide, or something, and then the lead magnet as well inside, like telling you actually how to do something. Then an aggregator post is, again, we took the, you know, five examples of brands that have gone from invisible, or, how five of the best-known brands in the world went from launch to over a million dollars in under twelve months. You take their content on how they did it, because they all talk about this, they love talking about themselves, these kind of brands. You just take that kind of content. It would be, hear how Uber tells you how they went from launch to a million dollars, which is not, they went hundreds of millions of dollars in twelve months, but you look what they've written about.

Again, you could then say to Uber, hey, Uber, you made our list. You'd be surprised, we get some retweets from really big people. You say, hey, you made our list on the five most successful brands, or whatever, we'd love it if you tweeted this out, and they will. They'll retweet you and stuff, or even send it out. We've had a couple of people do it.

There's a ton of different ways, but at the moment, the basic stuff is, pay for your traffic. To a genuinely useful post.

J: Okay.

M: If you look at Dave Navarro, not the guitarist, but the launch coach, he has ass tons of traffic, and he has got three blog posts, I think. It's just because they're super useful. But you'd like, you should read Dave Navarro's stuff, because they're all worksheets, as well.

J: Oh, really?

M: Really useful.

J: Cool.

M: Yeah.

J: So he just literally has just three blog posts ...

M: Well, they are the blog posts, are the worksheets.

J: Oh, that's it.

M: Yeah.

J: That just drives all the traffic flows [crosstalk 00:16:35].

M: [crosstalk 00:16:35]. Yep, explodes the list.

J: By doing the traffic building stuff, or whatever.

M: The idea is, by this point, when they've signed up, you should be, none of this should put you off, you should be automating splinter products, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. That can, I overcomplicated that when I first started. I had splinter products set up, and membership sites, and stuff. You don't need to do that. If you build up a bunch of people at a time, you just say, hey, we're putting on this live webinar, and you continue to give them free content, and then you take that and package it up as a video and send it out to them, or an e-book that you've been writing in the meantime, that you sell to them, you don't need to overcomplicate it with a splinter product on the back end. You just need to keep them engaged. That's what you should be doing, with weekly newsletters, new blog posts, webinars, stuff like that.

Yeah, it's really tough to start with.

J: When you say about new blog posts, you say like, Dave Navarro's only got three blog posts?

M: Yeah, if you published another one obviously you'd send that out, but it doesn't have to be about that. It could be curated content. You'll see a lot of newsletters promote content that other people are writing, because it's still useful content, and you want to be seen as the one who's sharing it. It's basically like Facebook sharing, but via email, so you might find a blog post that's useful and just share that out.

That's, again, that's another hard bit. People that ... A list has got a half life, it decays over time, you know?

J: Yeah, exactly.

M: It's just keeping them engaged, but Sean Mize, for example, he doesn't always send them content. He'll send questions, and he'll send saying something like, hey, what do you actually want to achieve this month? Or, Tell me what the biggest obstacle is in your business? He just keeps up dialogue with them.