Before Fan Page Funnel

2 Products:

When Josh Dunlop first came to us, he was running a small photography blog and trying to make a little money on the side with it. You’ve probably been there, or are there now, you’ve got 2 products, they cost around $100 bucks each, maybe $97.00, we like that number here, you blog a bit, post things to social media, and read a couple of blogs about making money online.

The big problem here is that that is far from sustainable, you and Josh still need your day jobs, you labor over your side projects when you’re supposed to be eating lunch and dinner. It’s just not there yet.

Trying to relaunch:

What Josh did next is what a lot of people do, he would create a new product once and a while, but didn’t really have much success with ‘launching’ them. They didn’t really get much traction, despite his best efforts. He would do what a lot of people resort to when they need money, flash sales. And too many of them.

$50-100 in monthly FB spend:

Josh was dabbling in advertising, he knew it worked, everyone says it does, but what they don’t say, is how to make it work. So Josh was spending around $50-$100 a month on ads, just trying to bring a few people to his blog, a couple converted, he has a small e-mail list of a few hundred people, but again, it just wasn’t what was going to give him a sustainable business. The traffic was good, but the funnel was very unreliable, which made income unpredictable. 

Scared of his bill:

A lot of guys will tell you to spend more. They are right, a bigger sample size (how many people move through your funnel) give you more statistically significant data (Meaning there is enough data to tell if your results are a fluke or not). 

Josh listened, he started upping his spend and gathering more data. Unfortunately, without a strong system in place, he started to get worried. Every week or two, a charge from Facebook was coming, usually before he’d had a chance to earn back his full spend (and he wasn’t even sure that was ever going to happen). 

Scary Stuff.

Blogging here and there but not entirely focused:

Josh also knew to blog, everyone making money has a blog right? But the blogging was sporadic, he wasn’t too sure what to write about because he didn’t know what his audience wanted to hear and his numbers weren’t there to make an educated decision about what to put out there. He was bored of his website, and he’d run out of things to write about. 

Unsure of audience demographics:

A big part of the reason Josh wasn’t sure what to use in his ad copy, or his landing pages, or even what to blog about on bi-weekly basis was that he just didn’t have a great understanding of who was actually buying.

As the saying goes, if you’re looking for cats, but using a dog whistle, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Promotion strat: Fake deadlines, countdowns, other less savory methods:

We all know this online advertising business has a darker side, fake countdowns, “limited” slots, buy or die mentalities abound. Josh even tried this, but just didn’t feel good about the face he was putting on his business, and frankly, it still wasn’t making him the money he needed. It felt false to him, and his audience felt it too. 

Time to Change:

This is right about where we met Josh, he had a start, but wasn’t making much headway. Josh’s brother, the other Dunlop is actually a good friend of ours and we were introduced through him at an event in D.C.

At that event we sat down together at a card table, and talked through his business step by step. We helped him with everything from  Facebook Marketing Strategy to ways to Get More Fans on Facebook. Josh is a quick study, and as soon as he got home he hustled to implement everything we had discussed into his business. Keep reading to learn about the transition period and where he is now.

During

Learned to use analytics:

With our huddle fresh in his mind, Josh dived headfirst into his analytics. From Facebook he learned who exactly his audience is (40+, high income, artistic, married, some college education) by diving into reports, and from his analytics and testing tools he learned what parts of his site were working, and also importantly, when, they were working. No need to advertise when your audience is sleeping.

Remember the analogy about calling cats with dog whistles? With this information freshly in hand Josh had just found himself a cat whistle. He now knows who to target, when and where. What to target them with to bring them into his ecosystem is the next big question to answer.

Learned the power of PDF versions:

If you can’t tell yet, Josh is an earnest and hard working guy. He knew his content was good, and his price fair, but he was really having trouble to get people into his funnels far enough to understand the value of his products and be willing to invest. 

That’s where the PDF version shines. Josh said “One of my biggest lessons was to make a low cost PDF version of everything.”. What this means is that for every piece of big ticket content you produce, you should also consider doing a small PDF packet or infographic that can either be used as a $10.00 “intro” product, or as a free content giveaway to build your value before going for the sale. 

With the power of the “cheap” PDF in hand, Josh’s landing pages and front end (Ads, Landing Page, Sales Page, Checkout) were finally performing well, his ads were close to breaking even, his lists were growing and he finally felt things were on the right track. But still, not quite the quit-your-job numbers he was hoping for yet.

Learned the power of an appropriate back end:

The final piece in the profit puzzle for Josh is what we like to call the “Back End”. There are a couple of key pieces to a solid back end (not that kind), which we’ll cover in the next couple of paragraphs.

First are upsells. An upsell is what you present a visitor after they purchase that initial $10.00 product. For Josh, the $97.00 product he was selling before this shift made a great upsell. It was an expanded and more informative version of the smaller $10.00 product that was selling steadily. The benefit of a good upsell is this: even if only 1 in 10 people actually take it, that is the difference between $100.00 in PDF sales, and $197.00 in sales plus upsell. He was nearly doubling his sales just by having 1 in 10 of his new customers take an upsell. 

Secondly, after our little chat Josh went ahead and overhauled his follow up strategy. Key to this is what are known as auto-responders, which are automated e-mail chains that are triggered by particular actions and signups from customers and leads. These e-mail chains tell a story based on what that customer or lead has showed interest in, so it’s possible to build highly relevant and timely messaging strategies which speak directly to where a customer or lead is RIGHT NOW. Autoresponders can can do anything from build goodwill, give away content, build hype for new products, or sell products which compliment what a customer already has.

Using a powerful auto-responder campaign, Josh was able to add an additional $25.57 on average to each of his new customers through providing good content after the purchase, and the occasional sales offer which fit his subscribers professed needs and interest.

Learned not to be afraid of spending ad money:

If you recall from the beginning of the story, when Josh was starting spend more on his advertising he had the prospect of a big bill from Facebook looming every few days or weeks. Not fun, we’ve all been there.

What changed with his new approach however, was that with the improved back end, front end and analytics Josh had on hand, he was able to more consistently say “If I spend X, I can expect to get a return between Y and Z. Once he had that in hand, it was simply a matter of spending money to make money. When you are in that position, it can be hard to spend enough!

A turning point for Josh was when he went into his sales data, and had a look at what a sample size of 1,000 Facebook subscribers had spent after just 45 days. He was earning a whopping 300% ROI.

Can you guess what he did next, and hasn’t stopped doing since?

Ramped up spending from 2k-5k-10k

With his newfound predictable, profitable campaigns in hand, Josh started ramping up his spend, going from $2,000.00 per month, to $5,000 even scraping $10,000.00 on really big months.

Now begging for FB to take his money:

As he ramped up his spend, and saw the profits rising with it, Josh couldn’t spend enough. Regarding this, Josh said “It’s like, I can’t even spend enough! I’m looking at my bill and wondering why Facebook isn’t spending more, it’s crazy.”

There are of course a ton of ways to push up your spend on Facebook, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. 

One outstanding day $1,700.00 in a day +1k Subs:

We asked Josh what his biggest “Aha!” day was and he told us it was the day that he spend $1,700.00 on ads in 1 day, brought in over 1,000 subscribers and made $2,857.00 in profits on that single group over the course of 45 days. We’ll break down the campaign below so you can see in real dollars and cents what Josh simply described as “Crazy.”.

Lost money in the beginning,1-3 days to recoup:

The Campaign

• 1,700 in ad spend
• 1,000 new subscribers
• Cost $1.23 per new subscriber
• $1,000 initial “PDF” Sales
• Lost $700.00 on his $1,700.00 ad spend
• 45 Days Later- $3,557.00 in sales on the back end
• Total Profit For The Campaign: $2,857.00 

So to summarize, Josh started with a big spend on Facebook, enough to make most marketers nervous. That initial spend brought in a hefty leads list, and a decent chunk of front end sales. But it didn’t break even, in fact it lost $700.00 dollars. However, because of his robust back end, over the next 45 days Josh made an additional $3,557.00 in sales resulting in a total profit for that days “campaign” of nearly $3,000.00

Now

Understands his customers, how, what, where when they buy:

If you talk to Josh today, he’s in a very different place, he’s got an iron grip on his audience and what they want and expect from him. He’s able to put the right ad, the right product and the right message in the right place at the right time to drive sales and maintain the lifestyle most online marketers dream of.

Has a strong back-end infrastructure (Upsells):

Josh told us in this interview that the thing that has made the biggest difference in bringing him from where he started to where he is today, is the power of the back end, which is an area a lot of marketers either do wrong or don’t even know to work on.

Has a relevant and steady communication stream:

The other major factor in his ongoing success according to Josh is his robust auto responder system. By tailoring and segmenting his audiences carefully, he can make sure that even though they are receiving automated e-mails, the e-mails are pertinent to where the lead is in their “journey”, and is generally something they want to open and read.

By having an audience trust and look forward to his e-mails, Josh is in a position to turn up the heat when it’s time to make some money without burning out an already frazzled list (I’m sure some of you can relate. ).

To further flesh this out, Josh was kind enough to share with us some of his numbers from a campaign he ran last week, and some of his overall stats for the whole year. Check them out below.

Winning Campaign

In just six days:

• $4,934.62 advertising spend
• 16,688 clicks
• $0.45 cost per website click
• 4,252 New E-Mail subscribers
• 398 Customers
• 9.36% Checkout Rate
• $12.40 Cost Per New Customer
• $20.36 Average Transaction
• $8,104.00 Total Sales
• $3169.38 Profit in just 6 Days

With a conservative estimate of $3.50 in sales per subscriber over 45 days, Josh can expect to earn a total profit of $9947.38 just by running some ads for 6 days.

Josh doesn’t want to share the exact financials of his business, but here’s some information that he will share:

• Roughly $100,000 in sales of his own products in just 7 months of having this new funnel set up
• Over $50,000 spent on advertising in the last year
• Over 20,000 new subscribers through Facebook alone
• Over 7,000 transactions
• With a successful funnel in place, he was able to create 4 new products, effectively doubling his revenue
• Can now guarantee himself a very positive ROI on any ad spend, on any network
• With such an effective funnel, he’s moved into Adwords and YouTube too

Taken on it’s own, Josh’s profit from his advertising traffic is certainly a nice supplement, but that’s just the beginning of the story. By adding 20,000+ new subscribers, and 6,000+ new customers, Josh is able to have a waiting customer base for any new product he creates, or a great circle for any word of mouth of affiliate marketing he participates in.

Because of that one chance meeting in Washington D.C., Josh is living the marketers dream and is traveling all year. He’s just finishing up in Thailand, and he has South Korea, China, Malaysia and Japan booked. 

Hats off to Josh.

What’s Next?

If you want to get your hands on the exact same resources and coaching that Josh used to build his business, you can get the Fan Page Funnel from Brian Moran @ Get 10,000 Fans.