Andrew: This program is about how to launch your product profitably. It's led by Sean Malarkey with the founder inspired media, the company that does training for proven marketers I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com and all help facilitate the session. Sean, you know the audience here, they're the kind of people that say show me what you've done with what you're about to teach me, They want proof, so what have you done with all of these tactics that were about to go through the course? Sean: Awesome. That's a great question. First of all, thanks for having me on Andrew. Andrew: Oh, yeah. I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. I appreciate it. Sean: It's a big honor so first of all in the last year in the last twelve months my business partner and I have done four product launches for products .We are considered experts in social media training so we rolled out some social media training this year and we did a launch format. The very first month he put very little effort into. If you want to hear the full story on this I can get into it, but I think we literally put less than half a day's work into it and we generated close to $100,000 in revenue so we were pretty impressed with those results. Andrew: Wait, did you say $100,000? Sean: Yes. Andrew: Oh, that's the first one. Sean: Yes. So we were really impressed with the results in some of the after effects if you will so we decided to redo that six months later and we relaunch that product. And again we put more effort into it this time and got almost twice the results out of it. So we were really blown away. Andrew: So that's $200,000 for the second one. Sean: Yes. Roughly. Give or take. Andrew: Give or take. A little bit less, it sounds like but that gives us an understanding of it. Sean: Yes. So the third one we did a little bit of a different route but we launched using a lot of the same things and we introduced a couple new products that really helped our sales and we also introduced a couple the new elements in product launch that we'll talk a lot about today in this call. That really, really helped our sales. And that one generated, I forget numbers but it was really good. And this last one we just did in December, November-December, 2011, we generated somewhere around five hundred thousand dollars in revenue and again so all of them are digital products so it's almost is a very low cost in it if you will. Andrew: So no shipping costs, no creation costs, all digital half a million dollars in revenue is what you got going and using the ideas that you're going to go ahead and teach us in this session but quick, before you got this right you had another product where you were suffering you had some of the issues that a lot of people who are watching us are having right now. We went to the website and this is what we saw. Can you tell me a little bit about this product? Sean: Sure. Andrew: What was this? The site's down now, but this is what was on the website. Twix blowed. This is the alert that is on the website. What is Twix blowed? Sean: This is embarrassing to look at but Twix blowed, I know it's probably the worst name ever but that was basically training on Twitter. Early on in Twitter I got pretty good with Twitter I was using it for business. I had a real estate business at this time and I saw Twitter as an e-mail list so the bigger the audience you have, you know, a targeted audience, the more traffic you can drive with it. In my first three months in Twitter I think I grew to over seventy thousand followers on there. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Sean: At one point, I cracked into the top 200 and maybe even 100 I don't even remember. Anyway, I ended up creating training and everybody kept asking "How are you doing what you're doing and show us how you do it." So I was telling friends and doing that. In that particular training I thought I was going to be a millionaire from that training. [chuckle] Andrew: We're all on twitter you got the magic already so you're going to teach us how to get the same magic so we can grow our Twitter followers and of course twitter followers can each wall revenue if its done right. So I can see how you would think you would do so well. But the site is down now why? Sean: It's mainly down not because it wasn't a good idea, it generated some revenue, not a huge amount but I guess most people would be happy with that but It's down now because it is not worth it from a ROI standpoint for me to go back and invest in fixing the products. It's a very visual product so it incorporated a lot of images from twitter and how Twitter looks and twitter has changed a lot. And if it's also some techniques and tactics that I don't really recommend anymore based on what's happened to Twitter over the last couple of years and to be honest there are very spammy. They are just not very cool and three years ago there were not many rules and no one seemed to mind at that point. Now, people definitely mind and there's been kind of some roles established. So I'd have to go back and read about the whole course and it's just and from time spent on activities it's not time spent on activities it's not the most profitable reward. Andrew: OK. It's not a huge, uh, not in fact any financial loss, didn't set the world on fire either and part of the reason was that you didn't know how to launch it you didn't know how to do the proper launch. Today you've done it multiple times including this last one where and my audience has an understanding of what you're able to do with it. They don't care about you or me anymore they care about themselves and they want to know how they can do it, too. Let's go right into the big board, the big board says the first tactic is to read your customers minds and know how to launch a product that they want, how long secular product that they're actually looking for right now. So how do we do that? Sean: Okay this is pretty simple. Everybody listening to this call is probably in one industry niche or another. Andrew: Uh-huh. Sean: And there's probably an expert that knows a lot about that and that's probably why they're in that industry. So the end of result at the end of the day you just want to deliver what your customers want. For us that was training on how to use social media to generate more business. for whatever industry or niche we have training is for that so and it's pretty simple for us with social media and how it changes there may be one network that, for example later this year we're on the fence we're contemplating doing a Google plus training. Andrew: Sorry you're about to answer my question. How do you figure out what that killer product is and I know were going to spend more time talking about how to promote it, how to get people to sell it at make sure you close sales and make it competitive for people who want to help us to make it even more sales done and they would have on their own ?but finding the killer product is one of the first apps. How do we figure out what it is how do we know what that killer product is going to be? Sean: Yeah for sure. So, Steve Jobs was pretty good at figuring out what people want before they knew what they wanted and I don't think I've got that kind of crystal ball and I don't think anybody here really does make it I guess just looking at where your customers are into and what a wine you know there's a lot a different way than we've done a lot of surveys in the past to our audience to figure out what they want and what they're interested in but a lot of times it's just intuition. So with this last product launch we did Facebook. there are a lot of different Facebook products on the market there are a lot of experts in that space, but our audience and our affiliates, a lot of them hadn't exposed their audience to Facebook yet. So we said this is kind of a natural progression for us because we had done a RSS Facebook training and a YouTube training. Andrew: LinkedIn? Sean: Yes, LinkedIn. Andrew: All right so he figured that it's natural to go next to Facebook is that what this is? Here let me bring this up. Sean: That was actually in our first products business this is 500 man strong and that was a really high-priced product that we used an evergreen launch forum for. We can talk about that later if you want but that was kind of the member's area and people really, really loved that product, it's a good one, but that was the catalyst for creating these low-priced products because we charged a thousand dollars, sometimes two thousand dollars for this training in one form of it or another. And a lot of our customers couldn't afford that and they said they wanted the hundred dollar training or the stuff that was cheaper so that was kind of the inspiration to do the lower-priced products. Andrew: Let's go to the next one. So as an influence this is another product that you've been selling? Sean: Yes, this is kind of a members area it's a little peek of what that looks like. Andrew: Yes, this is what people get after they pay you to get access to this. Let's zoom in on the menus. What else is this? Sean: Yes with this product, this is really one of our best products, the members area includes all the different modules which is all of the different trainings broken down into chapters if you will, video chapters and in those sections as well they can access transcription they can access the slides for whatever reason some people like the slides. Some people want the slides that were used we give them to them they can use them in their own presentations and for their own note-taking for whatever reason. We also have Cliff notes so we train our support people to go through all the training and that's where the assessments come from so all their important notes those then become Cliff notes. Andrew: I see. Sean: It's great. Our customers rend to love that they have access to that, they can download the audio. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Sean: We don't let them download the video because I guess it makes fire is the one step harder piracy is a big issue for us. Every single day someone has ripped off for a product to sell it so we don't do a video download. But they get that it may get access to a bunch of resources, a lot of really cool stuff. We create [?] for all of our products and let people that buy that product interact and help each other, and then we pop in and help out from time to time as well. Andrew: OK, and one of the key elements of your sales process is to do this, to get that army of affiliates that's going to help you sell. Sean: Right. Andrew: Tell me a little bit about how you do that, and I want to also look at the process that you use to do it. First of all, how do you even find your affiliates? How do you know who the right affiliates are? Sean: This is kind of a good time for that question. I have a good friend that's coming out with a product and he was asking the same question today. I'll be honest here, this isn't something that can happen overnight for most people, and this does take work and takes time, but in the long run it pays off and I don't know what your definition is, but a lot of people want things now, but it took my business partner, Lewis, and I, a couple of years to get to where we are now, which I don't think is that long. It didn't take us a couple of years to start making money. It took us a couple of years just to get to the level we are now, so to get back to your question, to get the [?] affiliates, there are a bunch of industry events that people in our industry hang out at, and they go. In fact, tomorrow I'm leaving to go to one in Austin where I will be networking and hanging out with people that are our current affiliate partners and our potential new affiliate partners. Most people in business like to help and promote people that they know and like and trust, and it's hard to develop those relationships on-line, not impossible, but it's hard, so what we do, and it's pretty systematic really. At the end of the day, when you stop and look at it, in order to do this, we usually start on-line, so we know who the key players are in our space and our industry and I imagine anybody who is on this call knows the same. They know who is important, who is an influencer, who has a large audience, who may have a large email list, who has a blog that gets tons of traction, and then we start from there. So we figure out who those people are. A great tool to kind of start using to pay attention to these folks or get in front of them is Toot Suite, and with Toot Suite, my partner and I both create lists of influential people who we want to use in the future as affiliate partners to work with. We'll go through and you create a list of these people and it gives you the ability to briefly interact, to kind of know who they are, what they like, learn a lot more about them, and then also go from there over to Facebook and form a relationship over there as well. Once you retweet somebody's content [?] and you respond to the tweets they're putting out, you "Like" their post on Facebook, you comment on there, it does a couple of things. It opens up the door for reciprocity, so if you support someone over and over and over again, their natural instinct is going to be 'how can I support you?' In their mind, it may be retweeting some of your content or commenting on it, or it may be promoting your next product. Andrew: Let me get a little bit more than this because I think most people know about how to comment and chat on Facebook and Twitter and everything else in [?] connections, but I need something that's a little bit beyond what they know. Why don't we go to this story about the person who sent us a certain kind of bag out [SP]? Can you tell me about that guy, and then I'm going to dig in and find out how we know who he sent the bag to? Sean: Yeah, so there is someone in the real estate space who has real estate information and sold products. This was about a year ago or two years ago. He was coming out with a big product launch and he knew the majority of people on his list, but several he didn't. He ended up [?] about 30 of the key players in his industry and he sent them a bag, and this is really ballsy, but you know what, in a lot of these situations, in order to get noticed and get peoples' attention, you've got to be different. So he literally overnighted a FedEx box, the boxes that are the square ones... Andrew: Yes. Sean: ...and inside the box was a little canvas bag, the old school money symbol on it, so it looked like the kind in the western movies when they rob a bank, they run out with a little canvas bag, so literally inside that canvas bag was a thousand dollars in cash, in hundreds, twenties, fifties, tens, and ones, probably a couple hundred different bills, but the total of it was a thousand bucks, and a note, and it said on the note 'hey, this is a thousand dollars cash and it is a bribe. I'm hoping that with this bribe, I can your attention and get you to help me promote my next product, and if you want more information, go here.' So he had an unlisted link to a site and page of his, and when you went there, there was a video that just says 'hey, the thousand dollars is yours to keep. I hope you enjoy it. I do consider it a bribe. I'm trying to be funny, but I would love your support on this product launch.' I think out of every single person sent to, I don't think there was one who didn't [??], I think every single one did. Andrew: All right. That's really powerful, and one of the reasons why it's powerful, of course, is that he was creative and gutsy. The other reason is, and I wrote this down as you were talking, he had 30 key players that he sent that box to. He didn't just send it out to anyone out there with a website, or anyone out there with an affiliate program, or who'd join affiliate programs. Give us a little insight into how to find the right affiliates. Sean: OK. So, in every industry, like I said, there are key events in every industry that I think you should be attending. You know, we have three to four big ones that I mark off every year. The one I'm going to tomorrow, it should be about 250 players out of our industry, and I haven't worked with probably 240 of them. So . . . Andrew: What is the event? Sean: It's a Ryan Deiss Traffic and Conversion Event, down in Austin. Andrew: OK. Beyond Ryan Deiss' event, what other events are there that we should be considering going to? Sean: South by Southwest is probably the biggest one. Andrew: OK. Sean: Or, one of the biggest ones. And Affiliate Summit is a great one . . . Andrew: OK. Sean: . . . as well. And then, you know, depending on what your industry or your niche is, you're going to know the key events in your space that you need to attend, where the key players are going to be there. Andrew: You mean the key events, not necessarily for affiliates, but the key events in general, and what you're doing there is getting to know people who could potentially become your affiliates. Sean: Yeah, anybody who has a large database of listeners, or an audience that, you know, would be able to send traffic to your [??]. Andrew: In other words, even though I am in the startup space, and I happen not to be an affiliate of any program right now, because I have a big audience, I'm the kind of person that they should be talking to and saying, 'Hey, you should consider running my offer. I'll make sure you get paid well and build a relationship with me.' Sean: Exactly. Andrew: What about this . . . Sean: And the other thing too, I mean, you mentioned startup space. For you, for example, I mean, it may be beneficial for you to spend a lot of time and become an authority on Hacker News, or any kind of online forum or website where people will remember you, know who you are, and see you as a leader in that space. Andrew: OK. Sean: So we've done that a lot too. Andrew: I see. Where else can we go and figure out who the top affiliates in general are, or where do they go and talk [thump]? There's got to be some message board . . . did you just drop your cup of water? Sean: I did! Andrew: You did! Sean: Hold on. Andrew: All right! I was wondering if I should acknowledge it or not. Sean: Yeah, yeah, because now it gives me an opportunity to put a towel on it, thank you. Andrew: No, that's all right. Yeah, good, I'm glad that you did that, and, look, is it all mopped up? I want to make sure everything's good there. Sean: We're good. Andrew: All right. So tell me about some websites, some blogs, where we can go and talk to super affiliates. Sean: That's a good question. You know what, in Mindstream and my niche, it's kind of like an old boy's club, if you will. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Sean: Here's what's happened, and I'll just be frank. Early on, Lois and I participated in a couple big product launches, and we did so in a really strategic fashion. We wanted to place kind of in the top ten. And we knew that by getting in the top ten, or the top five, or the top three, or winning the launches, other affiliates would look at us and say, 'OK. These guys are important, and they're key players.' And, as a result, now we are members of a bunch of, not a bunch, but several different Facebook groups, where they hang out, and these are private, closed Facebook groups, and they communicate that way. And there's also email lists, or, like, a Google Group that we're included in on, and that's the biggest thing. So, between those three things, between the live events, and, really, the work for the live events and getting to know the key players starts online months or years before the live events. So if I know that you're going to be at CES, or at the, I don't know if Hacker News does a conference, but, I would start with befriending you on Twitter, and trying to friend you on Facebook and liking your fan page. And then interacting as much as I can with the content that you put out and trying to get your attention that way. And we may form a friendship. Oftentimes we do, because you might say, 'Oh, there's Sean, and he knows so-and-so,' and then we communicate on Facebook, and now we meet in person. It's like, OK. You know, that wall, I guess, or that barrier between the two of us meeting is gone. Andrew: I'm sorry, but going back to the, finding the affiliates, part, about discovering where they are, you said, 'We became top affiliates,' so you were selling other people's products, right? Sean: Mm-hmm. Andrew: And by rising up on those charts there, you got credibility, and you got to meet the other people who were rising up on the charts. OK. All right. I'm going to come back to this point. I didn't mean to drill too much on this one point but, if everything else is based on building the affiliates, if what's happening in this space is that affiliates are the ones who are sending the most traffic, and the most consistent traffic, and the most profitable traffic, then I want to know how to find them. I'm going to come back to that point that you made about being a top affiliate, because that kind of wraps into a visual that we have here, that we're going to show people later on, that will explain how the person who's watching us can find out who . . . Sean: OK. Andrew: . . . top affiliates are. All right. But let's move on, if you don't mind, now, to . . . Sean: Sure. Andrew: . . . the next big point on the board, which is, you want to get feedback from your secret Beta group. Sean: Yes. Andrew: What is the secret Beta group and tell me when I should reveal the visual we have for that one? Sean: You can reveal it right away. Andrew: It's not that big a mystery but let's bring it up here. What's this? Sean: So with all of our products we're getting ready to go long before the public sees them. And with this last one that we did, I said you know what, I want to drum up some attention with our customers and then I also want to get some feedback on it and see if there's anything we can do to improve the product or whatever. So we put the whole product together and then I reached out and we have a couple different Facebook groups for our other products and email lists. And we reached out and we said hey, if you're interested in being a beta tester for a new product that we have coming out, hit reply, like this, or leave a comment, whatever, and what's expected of you to go through the course and report any broken links or any errors or misspellings or any mistakes that you see, any technical issues. But you'll get free access to the course and we value your feedback and that's all we really wanted in return is your feedback. Andrew: I see, OK. So before you even launch, you do the soft launch to a small group of people. You get their feedback, you get their broken links. I imagine you also get some testimonials from them and the screenshot that I showed up here, this is a Facebook group. Is this what you used to stay in touch with the people who are beta testing? Sean: So this group of beta testers, this was unbelievable. We put this together. I went through the entire course and clicked everything. I was like man, this is money. They're not going to be able to find a thing wrong with it. It's good to go. And right away, as soon as we gave them access, within a half hour, people started. And we created this Facebook private group. It's a secret group and what that means is it can't be found when people are searching the directory. We didn't want random people adding. So we added four of our best customers or 20 of them. There's four moderators and everything. Twenty of our best customers and just gave it to them. This was a way to thank them, also to get their feedback and learn about the product. So right away, we started getting comments of things that were going on and the first one that was so funny way, when you land on the member's area of all of our courses, we have a welcome video. And what that welcome video is, it's a face to camera video. So you can see the instructor of the course talking to you directly, direct to camera I think it's called, and then it goes into a little visual tour of the member's area, where to find different things and where to start and what to expect. Andrew: (?). Sean: Yes, exactly. Andrew: Yep. Sean: So if you hit play on that, it would just be Amy going hey, welcome to Facebook (?) influence, blah, blah, blah. And so it's just basically like when you go to somebody's house, if the door just opened and there was nobody there, it'd be odd. We want to be able to greet you there. We want to say thank you for picking a wise investment and give you a little tour of the site. So anyway, the first thing we started getting was, everybody in our staff uses Chrome and for whatever reason, in Explorer and one version of Firefox, the most common version of Firefox, that video would play but there was no visual. It was just a blank white space. You could hear the audio and so if you could imagine, we usually in the first few days of a product launch, I think on this one we did close to 1,000 sales. We would have had 1,000 people getting in there and probably a third of them would have landed and visually, it looked odd because there was nothing in this giant white space where there should have been something. And someone's talking. You're like where is that noise coming from? That's not a good first impression. Not what you want in the first couple days. Andrew: But Sean, why do you use this? Why are you guys recommending that the person listening to us use Facebook? Sean: Well, Facebook's amazing. I mean, we all know that. But for us, it was a place where people are every day. I mean, how many days go by that you don't log into Facebook? Probably none. Probably most people on here log on just about every day. Andrew: Right. Sean: So, we could have used a group. We could have used a forum somewhere or whatever, but we just thought, you know what? This takes me 30 seconds to set up a group and I can go through there, find them on Facebook and add them, and this is a place where everybody is. And the beauty of Facebook groups is that when you're a member of the group, unless you change your settings, you usually get notifications any time there's an update or a comment in the group. So we just wanted to make this as simple for our customers as possible to give us their feedback and we felt like Facebook, and for us as well. I'm a firm believer in simplicity. So this was one of the easiest ways to roll it out fast and make it convenient for everybody. And everybody was familiar with the platform. Andrew: Right. I see. OK. So now every time that someone in the group engages, it's another opportunity for everyone else in the group to re-engage, because they get messages about it. It's a place where they're already coming in, where they're happy to be in, unlike their inbox where they might not be so happy to be in every day. And you're just collecting feedback, collecting testimonials and building up to the launch. Sean: Yeah. I can't tell you, Andrew. There were so many things wrong with our product that I had no clue and things that I wouldn't have realized. For example, one of the.. . . two points variance in that line and what was interesting in this one, I think, is that the top one started really high. Can you scroll back over to the right so I could see that? And it ended up becoming the worst place. OK. We may have... If you look, each one of those... There's basically two points... Andrew: I see. So, you've got more here. Sean: Yeah. And if you scroll all the way back to the right, was there a specific... Yeah. On the one you were just showing, I think there was about a twenty percent improvement, which, that's pretty massive when you have one hundred, two, three, four hundred thousand views to a web page. Twenty percent can make a big difference. Andrew: OK. Sean: And on this one... you can see on this one there was a big difference between a winner and a loser on this one. Yeah. I don't know. So, this was a good one as well. But the reality of split testing is that you always want to test it, and if you have something that works on one product ... Or if somebody has told you, "hey, this looks great", you know, you always want to test up because that particular dissolve plug-in on one of our products literally doubled sales. Or almost doubled, there's like an eighty percent [??] eighty-five percent , and on another, it cut them in half. So, without that in place, sales were better. Andrew: I see. All right, this might be an even better one then to show ... Ok, so we obviously don't have all the stats here that we can show publicly. But what we're looking at here is with a dissolve you've got about five and a half percent, five and a quarter percent ... Without the dissolve removed, you're at... Let's see what that number is... four and a half. Sean: OK. So this is when we did testing. If you look at the top... stop right there. There's the original, notice that it's all in dissolve and above. Andrew Yep. Andrew: So, we've decided let's leave a headline above a video in this one. I'm sorry, it was a video and then a headline right below and then the dissolve; the headline was right above the cutoff point, if you will. And having a headline in there, you can see what a difference it made in sales. So, I think, I don't know, I'm not going to get into what the customer thinks and... because honestly, there is no way to know. But through testing we learn that ok, we don't want that headline in there. And then you can see the original in that one, and then having that dissolve in there... If you go back real quick. I think the original without the dissolve in that particular product was the highest performing. So, that was the situation where I was blown away because it literally doubled sales. Ok, great. Let's try it on this product over here. And boom. And the variants in the... in some of them you see them go up and in some of them you see them go down. And like that slanted line there, that's probably dependent upon the traffic source. So we have some affiliates that send a couple of thousands of hits and they might have two [??] and we have others that send in a couple of thousands of hits that might get twenty or a hundred. Andrew: All right, so it looks like for this test you bought about three thousands hits to see what worked best. Sean: Yep. Andrew: So we don't even have to do big elaborate tests. How many hits would you buy before you started offering the program out to affiliates? Sean: Probably, I mean, it just depends on what we want to test. Its. But probably anywhere between five and ten thousand hits. Andrew: So that's still not huge but it's a good amount of... It's a good span, but it's not a huge one. Sean: Right. Andrew: And actually that, what you just explained to me now, helps me understand why when I went to your site in preparation for this course to grab some screen shots, all I saw was a video. And then, I guess, if I paused the video, then the text would have come on. But I saw for a second there's text there but it disappeared. And all I saw was video. And I thought that won't play very well with you in this session so I won't show it. So now I see what you're doing. You load up the text so that it's ready to go whenever people hit pause on the video but until they pause the video and maybe if they don't, unless they pause the video, they don't see the text. They're just focused on that cool video with, I think it was Luis, out on a beach somewhere and the conversation on the bench. It was really well shot. Kevin kept moving, moving, moving and I could understand why you would want people to keep focused on that. To show the professionalism and the quality behind your work. Unlike mine, where all I've got is this, this , this. [??] cool tools. All right, I see what you're saying. I also see why you wouldn't want to run this out to affiliates. I would be the kind of person who would first hear, well, affiliate programs would work for guys like Sean and Luis, so what I'm going to do is go out to affiliates with my product and bomb. I wasted a relationship. Instead, you're saying, "no, go buy traffic. Test it there. Once you know that you've got something that works, then go out to people who are basically going to be risking their traffic, risking their revenue by running your affiliate program." Sean: Exactly. Andrew: OK. All right. Next big tactic. Let's go back to this big board. Next big tactic is to have two and a half week launch time and have customer service ready. Why two and a half weeks specifically? And let me bring up the calendar… What was interesting in this one was that the top one started really high. Can you scroll back over to the right so they can see that? It ended up becoming the worst place. Andrew: I see, you've got more here. Sean: If you scroll all the way back to the right. On the one you were just showing, I think it was about a 20% improvement. That's pretty massive when you 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 views to a web page. 20% can make a big difference. On this one, you can see there was a big difference between the winner and the loser. This was a good one as well. The reality of split testing is that you always want to test it. If you have something that works on one product, or a test that works, or somebody told you, 'Hey, this works great.' You always want to test stuff because that particular dissolve plugin, on one of our products, it literally doubled sales. Well, almost doubled, it was like 80% or 85%. On another, it cut them in half. So, without that in place, sales were better. Andrew: This one might be an even better one to show. We obviously don't have all the stats here that we can show publicly. What we're looking at here, with the dissolve, you've got about 5.5%. With the dissolve removed, you're at 4.5%. Sean: This was one we did testing. If you look at the top right. The original note is all dissolve headline and above. We decided, let's leave the headline above the video in this one. No, I'm sorry, it was the video, and the headline. The headline was above the cutoff line if you will. Having that headline in there, you can see what a difference it made in sales. I'm not going to get into what the customer things, because there's no way to know. Through testing we learned that we don't want that headline in there. Then, you can see the original, and then having that dissolve in there. The original without the dissolve in that particular product was the highest performing. That was the situation where I was blown away because it literally doubled sales. So I said, 'Great. Let's try it on this product over here.' And, then, boom. The variance in them, some of them you see go up, and some of them you see go down, like that slanted line there. That's probably dependent on the traffic source. We have some affiliates that send a couple thousand hits. You might get two sales. You have others who might send a couple thousand hits, and they might get 20 or 100. Andrew: It looks like overall for this test you bought about 3,000 hits in order to see what worked best. So, we don't have to do big elaborate tests. How many hits would you buy before you started offering the program out to affiliates. Sean: It depends on what we want to test. Probably anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 hits, depending on the different elements. Andrew: So, that's still not huge, but it's a good amount. It's a good spend, but it's not a huge one. Actually, what you just explained to me now, helps me understand why when I went to your site in preparation for this course to grab some screen shots, all I saw was a video. Then, if I paused the video, then the text would have come up. I saw for a second there was text, but it disappeared. All I saw was video, and I thought, 'That's not going to play really well here in the sessions, so I won't show it.' Now, I see what you're doing. You load up the text so that it's ready to go whenever people hit pause on the video, but until they pause the video, and unless they pause the video, they don't see the text. They're just focused in on that cool video with Louis[SP] out on the beach somewhere, and then a conversation on a bench. It was really well shot. It kept moving, moving, moving. I could understand why you wanted to focus people on that. To show the professionalism and production quality behind your work. Unlike mine, where all I've got is this, this, this, and other cool tools. I see what you're saying. I see why also you don't want to run this out to affiliates. I would be the kind of person who first would hear, affiliate programs are what would work for guys like Shawn and Louis, so what I'm going to do is go out to affiliates with my product. They bomb, and now I've wasted a relationship. Instead, you're saying no. Go by traffic. Test there. Once you know you have something that works, then go out to people who are going to basically be risking their traffic, risking their revenue by running their affiliate programs. Sean: Exactly. Andrew: OK. Next big tactic. Let's go back up to this big board. Next big tactic is to have two and a half week launch time. Have customer service ready. Why two and a half weeks specifically, and let me bring up the calendar that you use internally while you explain. Why two and a half weeks? Sean: I'll be honest. There's no right or wrong with this. This is what we've always used, and it works fairly well for us. Sometimes we go three weeks, sometimes we go two weeks, but mainly two and a half weeks is our average. We started this last one, as you can see there, on a Monday. People told us we were crazy. You never launch on a Monday. You should do Tuesday. You should do Wednesday. You should do Thursday. I don't really care what people say. The reality is there's no right or wrong, you just need to do it. For us, we've gotten great results every single time. Most of the time it goes against what people in the industry say is right or wrong to do. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt, including everything I'm telling you. Take what you're hearing from me that makes sense and apply it. So, the two and a half weeks works really well because it gives us the ability to do multiple contests, which a lot of our affiliates are contest driven. They like to be number one. They like to make it into the top ten out of thousands of affiliates. That contest environment can really inspire them and motivate the. It gets results that without that we wouldn't get. Remind me to tell you Cuba example in a minute. Andrew: The Cuba example. All right, I'm writing it down right here. Sean: This is really a basic look at our launch schedule, too. This was actually the calendar prior to having a bunch of things added. We designed this calendar ahead of time. We don't email our affiliates every single day of the launch, because if we did, that would probably irritate them. We do 80% of the days. We go in here and mark every single day that we're going to send them email. The person who's in charge of tracking that email and getting it out knows what days they need to work and put effort into that. Also, the cooler thing about this longer format is we do several different contests in here. It gives us the ability to do multiple ones that last over several days. Then we can so-and-so is leading today. Here are the top ten for today. Doing this over and over again, the affiliates love the recognition. By doing this they'll get motivated and promote where they may not have without this. Andrew: We'll get into the contests in a moment. For now, let me see if I understand what's going on here. First of all, when you say two and a half weeks, it looks like I'm taking it too literally. It doesn't necessarily have to be two and a half weeks. According to this it's not even two and a half weeks consecutively. Sean: You're correct. Andrew: What happens is on day one you launch a contest for your affiliates. They won, meaning Monday the 21st. That's when you start selling the product that you've created, right? Sean: Yes. Andrew: So this is when you want people to start selling it. You kick of the sale with a webinar, and we'll talk in a bit about that. Then it's officially opened on the 22nd. Sean: Yes. The night before we do a kickoff webinar. Andrew: Got it. A kickoff webinar the night before, officially open the 22nd in this case. You have a contest that ends a week after the kickoff. Then you have another contest. We're going to get into those contests. I want to dig into both of them and look at examples. Then, somewhere in the middle you have something called a small guy. What does a small guy mean? Sean: The concept behind the small guy is we have a lot of affiliates that will never win contests, like our top 10 or top 20 contests. So, we like to recognize all of them and do a prize where if you get 10 sales on this day, we'll give you an iPad. If you get five sales we'll give you a Kindle Fire. It gives us the ability to incentivize the small guys, which for us very important. About 70% through launch come from our top 20. Andrew: How many? Sean: About 70% of our sales. That's not the exact number, but thinking roughly about the numbers is should be about 70% come from our top 20. Really 50% to 60% come from our top 10. We use a website called ClickBank. ClickBank is basically our shopping cart. It's our affiliate program. It's our accountant. It does a lot of things. They have a lot of other people that promote products already built into their network. One of the things that drives up your score at ClickBank is how many different affiliates are making sales. So, if we say, 'Hey, make just one or two sales, and we'll give you this cool prize.' Which, usually for us, that level is a break even. If I say two sales, our profit is only a $100, I'm going to offer you a hundred dollar prize for doing that. The reason behind that is the more affiliates that make sales, the higher our what's called a gravity score on ClickBank is. It shoots up [??] and that gives us the ability to attract all these guys that we have no clue who they are, that end up generating a lot of sales for us in the long term. Andrew: I see, so basically all the sales that you make on the day that you're calling, Small Guy Day, you're breaking even on. The only reason you're doing it is to encourage guys to participate, even though they're not going to win the big prizes. And also drive up the ClickBank revenue on that day. Sean: Exactly, and you never know what's going to come for that. A lot of the small guys may promote your offer and somebody who's a medium sized guy, or even a large guy might see them promoting it and then get interested in it. For us it gives us the ability to drive up our gravity on ClickBank, so that we track a lot of new affiliates. Also a lot of these small guys a year from now are going to be big guys. So it gives us the ability to recognize them, and thank them as well. We do a video email or list out all the winners on our affiliate page if they won a contest. So even our [??] only get four, five, or six sales or whatever, they'd love to see their name in lights too, and it's inspiring for them, and a year from now they can be a big affiliate. Andrew: All right, I'm going to dig in to that in a moment too, and I want to understand contest since that works so well for you. I want to know why it works, I want to know what you're doing to bring people in. I want to know what you're doing to get people to be more involved in the contest, but let's make sure I'm thorough here before I get into that. The next big thing you're saying is you want to create an evergreen webinar. I'm guessing you do because what you want to do is bring more people in to the affiliate program. You want to get them involved more. See how I did that, that time I saw that you stepped away and I didn't bring the camera on you. I brought attention to you but I didn't bring the camera on you. Sean: I'm trying to get rid of this damn line, I've got a light behind my computer here. I don't know if you can see, I hope I got rid of it. Andrew: I see what you mean. So, tell me about the webinar if you don't mind. Sean: Yes, for us [??] the sales page that we drive traffic to gets [??] conversions. This is really important for a lot of you guys if you have software or a product that people can [??]. For all of our products, the webinar always convert better. Per click we generate the most revenue through webinar. What I mean by that is we send a hundred visitors to our sales page and five buy. We make, what's that work out to, it's $500 in revenue, $5 a click, that would be the earnings per click. If we send a hundred visitors to a webinar registration page, we will end up typically earning $10 to $15 per visitor. And those numbers aren't scientific, that's a good example of how they work. It's usually two, or three times of revenue. So we prefer to sale our product via webinar, and what we do in these webinars. We make them extremely educational so you as the promoter Andrew, if you were to send your audience to one of our Facebook trainings. You look like a champion because you're sending people to a training, it's a free training, and it's going to cover all these great things. And on the surface nobody realizes that you're trying to sell them something, so you don't look like the bad guy for sending them to an offer, which a lot of people have an issue with. Then what happens is, a lot of people register, attend the webinar, and our goal with all of our webinars, and it's always been this way. Is to deliver as much value as we can. And we feel like instead of trying to do all this, NLP, and crazy sales tactics, and sneaking stuff. We just feel like if we give good content and demonstrate a good case for why this product is important people will buy from us. We don't need to do all this backhanded sneaking sales tactics. So what ends up happening is 20% of the people on the webinar buy, there's 80% that don't. And we care about 80% as well. Especially since they're not our 80%. They came from you as the traffic provider, or as the affiliate. It's important to us that there full of high content, so that 80% lead is going, man that was a great webinar, I'm so glad I attended, and the other 20 that buy, says, that was a great webinar I'm so glad I attended, I'm so happy I bought this product. During one of launches, our second launch the second launch we decided to do a lot of webinars. It was a LinkedIn product, so Lewis was the face of that one. He was doing three webinars a day for two and a half weeks. I don't know if you've ever done it but it's just like this, you're just warn out by the time it's over. And I imagine doing three of these a day, it's a lot of work. Andrew: You know what, it is a lot of energy. Like if I lean back like this. You do this during the day when you're working, you lean back, but you've completely lost the audience, and it looks like you're not participating, so you have to sit up straight. And, that's just one element. So, you guys realize it's too much. You're going to lose Louis, your business partner. You can't clone him so you have to find a solution, and the solution is? Sean: The other thing is that a lot of our affiliates were saying, 'I want a webinar.' You want to say, 'Hey, we'd love to, but you can only get 30 people on a webinar. It's just not worth the two hours of time.' Andrew: Right. A small affiliate, if all he can do is send you 30 people, then you don't want to bother creating a whole webinar and merely killing Louis that day. Sean: To make a couple hundred bucks. It's just not worth it. So, what we did, we decided to go with Evergreen, an automated webinar system. There are a bunch out there that I want to recommend. It's called Stealth. I went through. I spent 14 hours over a two day period exploring Stealth. Andrew: Stealth Seminar. Sean: Yes. Andrew: OK. I'm going to bring up the ScreenShot, but let me make sure we're all caught up up until here. What you realize is, you send people over to a standard landing page you get some sales. If you send people to a webinar you make more sales. So what you wanted to do is say to your affiliates, 'Don't send people to a landing page like any old software site might have. When you're running an affiliate program, send them to this webinar. We will close in that webinar, and you will get a commission on every sale that happens as a result of the people you are sending to the webinars.' That's the way you were running things. It was exhausting you. You said you came up with this tool, which I'm going to show up on the screen right now. Sean: Yes. This is Stealth Seminar. What you're looking at is a peek in the member's area on the inside. This shows a lot of different events. What we did in using this, we record one presentation. In the presentation we don't make any mention of dates, time, good morning, or thanks for joining us this afternoon. There's none of that. It's what we call Evergreen. There's no mention of time or date. No current events are talked about. We're not talking about the Super Bowl. If you're talking about facts, you try and keep your facts as evergreen as possible. If you're saying, 'Facebook has 800 million users.' That's a fact that we don't want to use, because 3 months from now it's going to have 900 million users. Andrew: You want it to feel to everyone who's in there that they're watching a live presentation that's happening the minute they're listening. That's what you're using Stealth Webinar for. Those are the details that you're paying attention to. Here's another screen shot from Stealth Webinar. What is this? Sean: This is a peek inside the control panel. You give it title, a start date, start time, multiple times on different days. It does so many cool things. If you want a webinar to run on the week ends. You don't want them to start at noon. You want them to start at 2 p.m. You want to have the ability to change all that. You can do multiple times in a day. There's a lot of really cool stuff if you go around there. Andrew: Why wouldn't I just say, 'I'll record a webinar. I'll use maybe whatever my hosting company is. Something like Wistia. Something other than YouTube, so it doesn't look like people are watching a YouTube video. I'll say it starts at Monday at 8:00. When you go to the site at 9:00 or 8:01 or 8:02, just hit play and it will work.' Why is this different? I know that it's doing something different. What's it doing different? Sean: Here's the deal with webinars. Webinars work really well because it's a live event. So in your scenario where you said that you can watch this video at 8:00 on Monday. If I get there at 8:00, and at 8:10 my phone rings, I'm probably going to hit pause and talk on the phone. Or, if my doorbell rings, and my neighbor comes over, I'll go up and talk to them. I know that I can come back and start playing again. With webinars there's a whole psychological cycle. They're designed in a certain way. They work well because it's a live event. Think about interviews, Andrew, you come to and you hit play. Then you say, I'm going to watch this later, and you bookmark it. Andrew: And you don't because you know that you can come back anytime. So you don't ever come back. Sean: Right. With a webinar, how many foot ball or soccer games have you watched, with four minutes to go, and it's really close. Even though you could pause it and come back and watch it later, you want to watch it because it's a live event. Webinars work the exact same life. If people are excited about the information, they're getting good information, and they're getting value out of it, they don't want to leave because they're not going to get the information any other place or any other time. Andrew: I see. Also because there's a limited capacity, they feel that they have to register quickly. You wouldn't register to watch something that's recorded. So, what you want from Stealth Webinar is to keep that impression going. Sean: We never say, 'Join us for a live event.' We don't recommend it, because it's not a live event. Andrew: You call it a webinar. Sean: It's a useful webinar. It is what it is. It's a web seminar. It's the only time they'll be able to catch that information. Andrew: Let's look at another screen shot. What's this? Sean: This is just an example of the members area. And this, we used a white video or a white presentation of this, so you can't really see the border of the actual video on this particular screen grab. On some of the other slides is this webinar, where you . . . Andrew: Oh, so this is the webinar as people would see it. Sean: Exactly. Andrew: Got it. Sean: And it's actually changing right now, they're rolling out a version three. Instead of having this, a question box, where you put your name and email, hit submit, and it goes to an email, and then you can respond via email if you want, the new one, you'll be able to respond live. Andrew: Is that within the session that they can ask questions? Sean: Yeah. Andrew: Oh, wow. This is a great tool. So, stealth webinar, I'm going to bring it up on the screen. So when they use stealth webinar, people are feeling like they're watching something that's happening right now, and they can even ask questions in a box that doesn't get rid of what they're watching on their screen. Sean: Yep. Andrew: I see. OK. Here it is. All right. And then, this is, what is this? Tell me a little bit about this. This is . . . Sean: Oh, I just wanted to grab this little screen grab. So, as you can see down there, the numbers at the bottom, the 1 through 33, we had, on our last product launch, I think we had over 300 affiliates request webinars. Andrew: Mm-hmm. Sean: And, for us, the beauty with stealth seminar is, once you have one webinar set up, it takes all of about five minutes, at most, to clone and create a webinar for another affiliate. So we had over 300 webinars running during that last promotion. And literally on a daily basis we're running, well, probably 300 or more every day. Because our webinar is recycled every day, so if we had two times a day on Wednesday, by Thursday they would be playing again, the next day. Andrew: Oh, that's cool. All right. So, if I'm an affiliate of yours, not only can I send people to a landing page, but I could send them to one that would let them sign up for a webinar. And then you guys take it from there, and make sure that the person's treated well. And that's how you do it for everyone. Sean: Yeah. And this was huge for us, because a lot of our affiliates, you know, even the guy that only gets five sales? Andrew: Mm-hmm. Sean: Through giving him a webinar, he now gets 10 to 15. So you multiply that times 20, 30, 40, 50 affiliates, now not only are you making more money, but they're making more money, which is the most important thing. And then there's also the value outside of that. Whoever is presenting that webinar, you know, through an hour of listening to somebody you can really feel a good connection, and their personal brand of stock went way the heck up. So there's a lot of different benefits that come from doing that. Andrew: . . . [??] . . . Sean: But webinar is definitely the best format to present a product and sell it. Andrew: I see. Good. When I want to hear the behind the scenes stuff, when I ask you to to give me stuff that that the average user wouldn't see, that if the person who's listening to us were checking out your website and trying to figure out what you're doing, I want the stuff that they wouldn't see. And I appreciate that you're sharing that. Sean: Yeah. I just have . . . [laughs] Andrew: It doesn't feel sales all of the sudden. Sean: Yeah, exactly. No, I think people understand and appreciate, we're all about efficiency and simplicity. And there's no easier way for us to do 300 webinars a day, or 600 webinars a day. We're doing, you know, that a day, that's just not even possible. So this gives us the ability to reach massive amounts of people that we wouldn't otherwise. Andrew: All right. So I said, 'Really fire up sales with,' on the big board, and I left it hanging, and that's because we have even more than this to talk about. Starting with, give your affiliates a toolbox, so that they could pump up their sales. Let me bring up that we have, actually, a screenshot of what's in your affiliate toolbox. If I could . . . oh, actually, you know what? Let's say, let's show this. What is this? That's a blank screen. Sean: That's a chalkboard. Andrew: What is this? Sean: OK. This is a squeeze page for our affiliates. And let me just look. OK. Yeah, so, what this is, at the bottom of any of our products there is a link, next to the terms of service and the privacy and all that. It says, 'Affiliates.' When you click it, you come to this page. I need to change some of the data on there. Our refund rate is now about 6%, we're now over 4,000 units, and we have probably close to 400 [??]. But, anyway, this is a squeeze page for affiliates. So, about 80% of people, 70% to 80% of people, that land on this page enter their information. And then, once they do that, they're directed to the members area for affiliates, which has all of the content they need. It has a video, if we're doing a launch [??] there's video updates every day for what's going on with the launch, there's a contest board, there's affiliate graphics. So if they want to put graphics on their website, if they're going to do a review or mention it in a blog post that they're writing . . . Andrew: . . . [??] . . . Sean: . . . they can use some of our graphics. Andrew: So you give them all the stuff that they would use to sell. What we have here is just the basics. This is, you're giving them banner ads, essentially, to sell your stuff for you. Sean: Yeah, email to copying, everything. I've seen other affiliates do a list of SEO keywords to put on there if you're going to do something for SEO purposes, which a lot of these guys do. Andrew: You just want to give them as much as possible so that they can sell. You don't want them figuring out what email to write. If you're a better copy writer than them, you want to do that writing for them. If you're a better designer than they are, then you want to do that. Whatever it is, you want to give them as many tools as possible. That's what you're doing with new affiliates. Sean: Give them the tools they need to help make you money. Andrew: Right. Sean: There's a lot to be said for that. The simpler you can make things for your affiliates, the better off you are. Andrew: Swipe files, all the data. Sean: To give you an example, the webinars were so great for us. We said, 'Just hit reply if you want a webinar.' We got tired of forwarding emails to the person. So we said, 'Let's just create simple form on the affiliate page where they can put their name in, the day they want the webinar and hit send. Take us out of the equation.' So, we did that and we saw that 10% of the people. In the next video update that we sent out in email, we said, 'We made it so easy. You just go to the thing here, fill out the three fields and hit go.' Literally 10% to 15% of the response of what we would normally get. So, we killed that and said, 'Just hit reply on the email.' For what ever reason, that was the simplest thing for our affiliates. Andrew: Every little picture. An affiliate who wants one can have a webinar where you are teaching his people. He can tell his people that you're going to be teaching them. At the end, as you close, he gets commission for it. Sean: Exactly. Andrew: Awesome. Let's take a picture and the next big idea on the big board. Use contests. I've been talking about contests for a long time. You've been talking about contests for a long time. You know what? Let's bring up this. This is a list of the people who've participated in your contests and won them. Earlier when you said that you wanted to make a name for yourself, this is the kind of leader board that you wanted to be on. Sean: Exactly. Andrew: In this case, it's Carl White and Dan Kennedy and Darren Rouse. This is, by the way, your top sales people. These are the gifts that they got. Carl White got a bottle of Dom and an iMac. Dan Kennedy got a Mac Book Air and Apple TV and so on. What's important is everyone else in here gets to see who the winners are. This is why you wanted to be on some other program's lists so all the other affiliates get to know you and say, 'Boy, this guy Sean[SP] is huge. We should invite him in. We should have conversations with him.' Sean: Yes. It gets your name out there in front of the important people. Let's face it, they've got every single person on this list of top 20 was looking at this leader board. There were several new people and they were saying, 'Who is Joe Johnson?' or 'Who is Jim Jackson?' It gets your name out and starts getting you recognized. Then next time if Joe Johnson or Jim Jackson went to a live event, one of these guys might say, 'Oh, I know him. He was on that leader board.' All of sudden there's a level of credibility that's established because you can make it to that level. Andrew: I see. Alright, so tell me about beyond that. First of all, that's a real reason for someone to joining. But Dan Kennedy, people already know him. Carl White, the top affiliates, people already know them. They're not doing this to work the system. Why else are contests so effective with affiliates who should just be looking at this as a business transaction? I send you traffic. If that traffic converts properly, you send me money. I don't need contests. I don't need Dom. I can go to the store and by Dom for myself. That's the way I would think they would think. You're telling me, no, that's not the way they work. Sean: It's so funny. You're spot on. A lot of our counterparts do these promotions where they have cars at first place. I've even seen Ferrari's and pretty elaborate six figure prizes for first place. Most of those product launches are $1000 to $2000 products. Their numbers are more relative. Even some of the guys who do smaller product launches will do that as well. They may not make as much money. Their goals are to build a list or do whatever. We've always taken the approach that these guys aren't doing it for the prizes. It's really true. They're doing it for the recognition. A lot of them are ego-driven, and so they want to see their name in the top spot or the top 5 or the top 10. They have other reasons. They want that recognition for that. Someone who was on that list in the top 5, clearly had his spot locked down, and he knew that. With 12 hours to go before we finished that contest, he texted me and he says, 'How am I doing? Am I still in X spot?' I responded back, 'Yes. You're fine. You've got it all locked down. You're not going anywhere.' I think I said where are you or whatever and he replied back, I'm actually on a boat 40 miles off the coast, on my way to Cuba. Just to give you an idea. This guy is getting ready to go on a vacation or in the middle of a trip and all he is concerned about is what place he's in and where he's at. And in that top 10, if you go back to that graphic, we do masterminds, where we bring in all of our top affiliates with each product launch. And we got this actually, Ryan Dice did this and invited us to one of his masterminds for one of his product launches and it was big for our business, so we said let's do that. We like that idea, let's do it as well. And with this one, we rented out a big mansion in Palm Springs. So we said those that make it in the top 10 get invited and as a result, our number seven through about 15, about six to eight of those affiliates were really driven to get into that top 10 because they wanted to be there to hang out with all of the other guys and be seen in that light and get in the value added on that mastermind. So that one really helped. Andrew: In this case, you're only allowing the top 10 people to come? Sean: Right. Andrew: Carl White, Dan Kennedy, Darren Rouse, they don't show up for something like that, right? Sean: Yeah, they will. Andrew: Oh they will? Sean: Yeah. Dan won't but he'll send someone from his company. Andrew: OK. Sean: Which is crucial because that's the person who's making the decision as (?) anyway. Dan's not as active as he used to be. And Darren, I don't know if he's going to make it or not. He's in Australia, so he may or may not make it but I think he might. Carl will definitely be there and a lot of the other guys on there, all of them will be there, yeah. And we do it pretty big and pretty good that most of our affiliates know that they want to be at these. Andrew: I see. All right. You know what? I'm learning something all the time. I didn't realize the power of this. Sean: The contests are, it's so funny. It always blows me away. I will get, the last few days of our contests, I will get more phone calls and text messages from our affiliates who are concerned about their place and where they're at and who's ahead of them and who's behind them and how many sales or how much revenue. And it's amazing. Literally, a lot of money is made as a result from people just trying to secure their spots. Andrew: And you're tallying this, by the way, by yourself, right? There's no automation for this. It's just you saying, oh, no, you and ClickBank. Sean: Correct. We export reports on a daily basis and we have a little sale formula that calculates, but we just export a CSV file and plug it in and it gives us the numbers. Andrew: OK. By the way, if I were starting out and were in a similar business as you, couldn't I just come to this Mixergy program, do a quick screenshot of this. I don't know, I might even give this to members, and say let's see who these guys are getting. Who are the top affiliates? I see your smiling here. I'm watching you as I'm watching this. Let me see, who is this guy? Victoria Gibson, we're got to reach out to her and we've got to reach out to Eric Brown. We've got to reach out to Jeff Herring and all those people. Is that an issue for you? Sean: You know, I come from an abundance mentality, so I don't really worry about those things. All of this people on that list I have a personal relationship with (?). That's the reason why they . . . Andrew: What if it's not behind your back? What if they tell you, you know what, I've got a similar business. I'm not really competing with Sean. I'm looking for new affiliates. Clearly, this is a list of affiliates. I'm going to start off with these guys and just get to know them. Sean: Yeah, that's fine. And I get, if it's somebody I like and I know and they're asking me hey, will you do an introduction? I do that all the time. I introduce people all the time and for me, there's a lot of value in helping others help each other. So I don't have any problem with that and I'm not worried about someone coming in saying OK, these are the best guys. (?). Those types of people won't get anywhere and if they do, great. That's fine. I'm having an abundance mentality here. There's plenty to go around. Andrew: All right. You get this one day contest. When do you do the one day contest and what is it? Sean: So when you see you need a spike in sales or sales aren't going as well as you want, that's always a great idea, to give a little prize. Hey, today, if you get 10 sales, you're going to get a iPad. Or get five, you're going to get a Kindle fire or whatever it may be. But if you see sales not where you like them for that one day out, that will almost always get them back up. Andrew: All right. So you just toss out a one day contest. Let's see. What is this? I've got this in my notes here. You took this screenshot. You are, by the way, you are doing more screenshots before we started than anybody. We probably should have just turned on your computer but I wanted a crisp connection because people love the audio. Thank you for that. Sean: Yeah, that's smart of you. Andrew: So this is one of the screenshots that you took. What is it? It's command, shift, four, or command, control, shift, four on the Mac. You did that. Those keys must be broken because you hit them so much. What is this? What are we looking at here and how does this relate? Sean: This is from one of them, but this is, we like to do this in emails a lot. In these promotions, there's thousands of affiliates that are on these lists and get these and all of our affiliates know that. So we always do a top 20 or we do, we recognize the top 10 and also the 20 that are right behind it, in order to encourage and inspire people. It feels good. When you want to be in that spot. It feels good to know, 'Hey, I'm at that level with similar guys.' or 'I'm in the same league as these guys.' It's just a matter of personal recognition. Our first couple of launches we only did a top ten. Then I said to Louis, 'You know what, let's do a top twenty. The prizes don't have to be huge. They don't have to be massive.' If you go back to that top twenty graphic, you'll see that we had several whammies. That was because we had a bunch we had wanted to spend for prizes, and I said, 'How can we do this and still get 20 people in here?' I had seen someone else do the whammy thing, and I thought it was hilarious. So, I said, 'All right, we'll have some whammies thrown in there.' We were able to take a little bit away from the top ten and create a top twenty for the prize allowance by including some smaller prizes. But, these guys like to see their faces on there. They like to see their names. A lot of the bigger guys, if they promote, they don't want to be 14h. They don't want to be 13th. It makes them look bad. So, instead of sending one email, they might send two or three more because they don't want to look bad. Andrew: I see. I know that if I were on a list, I know Darren through his site, and I saw Darren is number 17, and I'm number 18, I'd want to really juice my numbers so I can beat him, because I know he's such a big player in the affiliates space. He's the guy who's teaching every one else how to do it. If I could possibly beat him, I would want to. Sean: Exactly. The other benefit is social proof. If there are several key players in your industry, or even one or two promoting it, if I'm a key player and I see that, I'll think, 'Well, they're doing it. I should probably do it as well.' or 'OK. I was thinking about it, but now that I see he's doing it, it must be a good product. It must be something I should get behind.' Andrew: That leads into the next big point, which is to use video email to recognize certain affiliates. Let me see if I can bring up a screen shot of what you guys do there. What is this? Sean: This is an email. We did a screen grab of the video that we put on the affiliate page. With almost every single email, almost daily. It's not every day, but probably 80% of the days during launch we do a video, and we do an email. We go through a three to five minute video, and we give data with what's going on with the launch, where we're at, and who the leaders are. If we're doing a one day, three day, five day or seven day contest, where people stand in that. It gives us the ability to recognize people. What Louis and I do with this is so dumb. We do this from wherever we are. Sometimes we're traveling. We did one from Australia. We've done these from Cabo. We've done it from our houses, apartments, offices, whatever. We just pull up, do a quick video. We keep it real and have fun. Our videos are ridiculous, Andrew. If you saw them, you'd laugh. We normally start the video out, Louis loves techno music, so there's always some techno beat playing, and we're dancing for the first couple seconds. Then it just starts, we're in a good mood. We're having fun. We go through and recognize everybody in the contest who's participating. It gives us the ability to get a message across, any important updates as well. We continually hear back from people that this is one of the best part about launches are the updates that come out on video. For whatever reason our affiliates love them. Andrew: I see. So, it would be like a news program. Here's where we are with the launch. This is what's going on. This is what's working for certain people. By the way, here's a little bit of mm-mm-mm music. Sean: We get ridiculous too. There was a time Louis and I were doing this. We used Skype to record it. We were actually sitting across the room from each other. While Louis was talking, I was throwing a football at him, and I was flying a remote controlled helicopter around his head. Andrew: Really relaxed in a way I can never be. I'm always all business here. If we told jokes for two seconds, I'd go right back to this shot. This is my shot. If someone's going for two long, or kidding around for too long, I go . . . If you watch me for a bit, you start [??]. Sean: Is that why you were doing that? Andrew: It was good. I'm learning actually. It's like, you can talk, you're going on a little bit too long. Alright. If it goes even longer, I do one of these. I think, maybe I go back to, 'Alright, lets, um, . . . ' Sean: You brought me back a couple of times which I appreciate. Andrew: I'm like the least having fun person out there. Sean: You know what we found? People love the authenticity behind us. For us, it's the simplest, quickest, easiest way. It's all about simple and easy and fast. Andrew: The problem for me is that my very authentic self is very anal. Sean: We see a lot of our affiliates emulating what we're doing. We're not original in any sense. I don't want to say we're first ones who did it. I see a lot more people doing video announcements. They are doing in front of green screens. They have fancy stuff. For me, I don't have the staff or the time to produce something like that on a daily basis. It's so easy. You just turn on Skype and do this and be done with. Andrew: Totally. I relate to that better. I'll tell you what else the green screen doesn't give you. Otherwise I might do green screen in the future, too. But I'll tell you what green screen doesn't give you, especially in times like this. There are times when my eyes wander and I'm like what does he have there? Oh, he uses a Mac. That's interesting. He's got a... you know, it lets me get to know you a little bit but it gives me something to do. Not now as the guy who's running the board here, checking out the keyboard, making sure we've got all the shots aligned, but if I were a viewer I'd be paying attention to background. You know? My eyes would naturally wander and much better to keep them wandering in the video than to go off the video because you gave me green screen and nothing interesting. Sean: Oh God, yeah. For me it's just too complicated to produce on a daily basis. We just stick with what's simple and works. Andrew: All right, back to Mr. Anal over here pulling up the big board. You do this email to recognize the top affiliates. You call top affiliates personally. How many phone calls do you make? Then I've got a screen shot here of something related to that. Sean: Yeah, the social [purpose] is biggest. With almost all of our top affiliates we have good enough relationships that we talk on the phone. What we'll do is, during the launch process, just calls them up and says hey, thanks so much for sending the traffic and sales. We really appreciate you. Basically just reaching out and taking that extra step to personally thank somebody and let them know how great they are and how much you appreciate them I think goes a long way. Even texting, something as simple as texting like hey, I just saw that you started sending traffic. Really appreciate it. Hope it crushes. Let me know if you need anything. Andrew: I see. Sean: Just being there for them. I think you have a screen shot of social (inaudible). Andrew: This is really good, by the way, for me to know. Because all I see as an outsider is you guys have an affiliate program and it must do well. What I don't see is what are you doing to make your affiliate program go well? What are you doing to juice up the results? It's the phone calls that I don't see. It's the webinar that's in stealth mode that I don't see. It's really helpful for me to see this part of the process. Sean: Yeah, for sure. Andrew: Let's bring this up. Sean: Oh, this was just a social proof thing. I talked to one of my affiliates and this was one of the reasons they promoted. Which this was a big affiliate worth thousands and thousands of dollars to us. With most of our emails we like to report the data and with this one you can see through the first six days this launch is 193% ahead of the last launch that they tracked (inaudible). Sales are strong, coming in every few minutes. Thanks for your support. Webinars... Anyway, we give out a lot of good data and any good positive data we have that sends kind of that social proof back to the affiliates is worth its weight in gold. I don't have to tell you my exact sales number but if I tell you they're double what we were on the last product launch. You know that was really successful. You think man, this is a good offer. It's converting really well and doing really well. It creates that kind of social proof, if you will, that will get a lot of affiliates on board. I had somebody on the last one call me and say hey, am you guys (inaudible)? You did really well with this launch and I just saw that you're 193% ahead. Is it really going that well? Well, of course it is. That's what you read. I'm not going to lie. Andrew: You know what, sometimes talking to people one on one really helps. I'll have conversations with people where beforehand they'll tell me they are going to say certain things in an interview. Then I'll say look, we haven't fully started recording. Just trying to get to know you. What's going on? Then they tell me how they're going to inflate the numbers for the interview. Sean: Oh God. Andrew: But it's one on one so they'll do it. Or they'll do, some people especially before interviews and courses, will just reveal stuff. They'll just blurt stuff out because, you know, you're having a one on one conversation. Sean: Right. Andrew: It's like private conversation is like truth serum with some people. They'll reveal things to me that, would you say this to journalists who are out to get you? Are you open mouthed like this with everybody? Sean: Well, dude, you're good. I've watched you pull information out of people and I'm like damn, how did he get them to reveal that? It takes two... Andrew: I keep secrets. That helps. All right, back to the big board. Calling up affiliates personally and next you monitor sales in real time using... Can I show these sales? This is your real sales numbers. Or do you want to introduce this before I show it? Sean: Show me what you're going to show because I can't remember. Andrew: Well, first of all the program that you use to keep track of real time sales is what? Sean: Colicky. Andrew: Colicky. That's GetClicky.com. Sean: There's several different real time monitoring stat things out there. I just happen to prefer and like this one. It's crucial, crucial to watch your live tracking. Especially during a launch. I've got a great example as to why this is so important. Andrew: Can I show this? You didn't even tell me what this is so that it would surprise me. Sean: Yeah, I wanted this to be authentic so I didn't want to tell you what it was. This is, if you can zoom in you can see a number on the top and a number on the bottom. You see 1,200 hits, 250 hits. Then, if you look, this is our outgoing links. If you look, there are two different links there. And [??], so what this means, and it's pretty simple, go to the next graphic. Andrew: OK. This one took a little while to get, and I don't even know what it is. OK. Sean: You see the 'add to cart' right below the video there? Andrew: Uh-huh. Sean: That is a script we use, it's on linked influence, I think, on most of our offers, if not all of them. When you land on the offer, there's a video and then a sales letter. We don't show that 'add to cart' video right away, because if you saw that when you landed there, you might be turned off and leave. Our studies have proven that. So, there's a script that makes that 'add to cart' button appear right below the video at the moment the price is announced for the product. After we've established the value, and the need for it, then we reveal a price. Then that button appears. Andrew: Let me ask you something. Does that happen about six minutes into the video? Sean: Yes. Andrew: So that's why it took me six minutes to grab this screen shot? Now I get it. You wanted to wait for this to pop up so you could explain it. I'm glad also that we did this beforehand so that we wouldn't have to wait six minutes for it to pop up in the actual session. Sean: Yes. If you back to that screen shot. Andrew: Let's bring that up. This is the Clicky data. Sean: I was looking at the traffic, and I said to myself, 'How is this one with the one dot link [??] pay, how is this getting any traffic?' I saw the one day in the live trap. I saw somebody click it. Here's what happened, the back story behind it. We had gotten an upsell approved at the last minute on that particular product. That upsell ended up taking the average customer value up quite a bit, about 30%. A significant number. What that means is that 100 people were buying the product, 30% were buying the upsell, which is a special one time offer. Right after they buy, here's another offer if you want. It's a really great deal. You can get it for x amount. A large percentage of people will take that. What we had to do was go back and change all of the links on our sales page so that when they click that link, they went through the right sales process that presented the upsell. Does that make sense? Andrew: Yes. Sean: So, in other words, if they click that link, then they buy the product, it says, 'Thanks for the purchase. Here's your product.' If they click the other link, it says, 'Thanks for your purchase, but wait. Before you get the product, here's a special offer.' A large percentage of the people were taking that, so the value went way up. I saw somebody click the old link a couple of days after I switched it, and I said, 'They probably had the page open on their browser for a couple of days and they never refreshed and are buying now. They were waiting for payday or whatever.' Then I saw it again, and I thought, 'That's really odd.' So, I went and looked. What had happened was, I know enough editing to get myself in trouble, and if I had delegated it, it probably wouldn't have happened. Andrew: Editing the video page? I mean the page that has the video on it? Sean: Yes. I went and edited that page. Any place where there as a 'buy now' link, which was the 'buy now' button and also several text links, where it might say, 'I'll take this offer now'. There were certain calls to action in text were hyper-linked. I went and edited them all. I forgot about that button. When I looked at the page, it wasn't there. Does that make sense? Andrew: So the main button, you didn't adjust. Sean: Not the main one, but the one that was hidden. Andrew: Yes. This one. The one that says 'add to cart'. Sean: What I ended up learning from that was that about half of our audience was clicking that button based on the traffic. I don't want to talk about this too much, because it's really kind of depressing. It cost me more than $5,000 by not fixing that link. Had I not been paying attention to the live traffic, I would have never caught that people were clicking that. Andrew: They were clicking the 'add to cart' button. Sean: That's the one that's hidden and doesn't show up until . . . Andrew: So, if they were clicking this and it had the old link, the 'add to cart' button. What else could they click? Nothing. Sean: If you were to scroll down the page, there are several 'add to cart' buttons placed strategically. Andrew: So, what you're getting is that people are clicking the other buttons, and that was taking them through the new process. Sean: The correct process. Andrew: The correct process, but the big button that comes six minutes into the video had the old process. So, going back to this chart here, which of these two links is the big button? Sean: The one right below it. Andrew: So, you somehow were getting 250 people out of 1209 were going to the old process, the one that doesn't have the up-sell; the one that isn't the newer, better, more improved, more revenue generating. Sean: At the time I changed it, it was half and half, if that makes sense. Andrew: So I see. So it was fifty-fifty and if you hadn't caught it then, you would have sent more people to the bad traffic, to the bad link. And that's the reason why you want to use not Google Analytics, even though they have some good real time, but get Clicky. Actually, [illegible] tells you in real time what's going on so you could adjust in real time, not the next day. Sean: Yeah. I haven't played with Google, but I know that Clicky is really good. Andrew: Yeah. Sean: You know what, this would have just, a lot of things could have happened aside from missing the sales. I would have fought my conversions on that upsell were horrible. And I would have spent a lot of time in here just working on approving that offer. My affiliates wouldn't have earned as much. So it has a big effect. And had I not been paying attention to live traffic, I would have never known. Never known. Andrew: All right. Finally, big board. Do these tests during the split launch, and there's actually a lot of different split tests that you want to do after we've launched. Excuse me, during the launch. Let me read off what you've got here on the sheet and then we'll. Or do you want to say, which, what do you recommend people split test? And then we'll look at a graph showing one of your results. Sean: So, this is kind of funny but like I really don't recommend split testing during a launch. I do and I don't. But, here is the thing. There's a lot of tiny, I always recommend, I think you should always use split testing. I think the market is always changing and I think consumers are always changing. So what works today, may not work tomorrow, etc., etc. But when you have a launch, it's, I mean it's for us there was a lot of traffic. I mean literally, tens and tens of thousands of hits every day. And, you know, one tenth of a percent can make a big difference in conversions to revenue. So we go through and we test things like font sizes. So, if our primary font size is a 12 or 14, we'll adjust it up or down and see what happens. We'll test colors on headlines. Again, these are things that are not major; that we've already tested; like header versus no header. Like, you know, dissolve plug-in versus not having the dissolve there. Certain headlines. We found like instead of saying "watch this video to learn the secrets of magic" we might say "Discover how everybody else is learning the secrets of magic" and for some reason that increases conversions.; by having that. So a lot of our major stuff we'll test ahead of time, but once we get to what we think is a winning formula we'll go through and start testing things like fonts. We might test placement of testimonials; having them higher up on the page versus lower down on the page. We might test the color of the headline. We might test different styles of fonts. You know, all kinds of different tiny, tiny elements that might. You know, when you're getting ten thousand hits a day or twenty thousand hits in a day, you can. If it makes one tenth of a difference to have a blue headline versus a red headline, or your "buy now" button is orange versus green. There are all these different elements you can test. Andrew: What program do you use for. By the way, once you get into tests, it's so fun and so addicting that I find myself just testing all the time. I try different button colors, I try different texts, and then people email me and they say: "Boy that's ugly. What are you doing over there?" And they won't realize they got caught in one of my tests. And they'll say you're absolutely wrong to have done this. You don't understand. And then I look at the numbers and I say this is even better than. The numbers show. Sean: You don't get it. Andrew: Yeah. Exactly. Even the fact that you noticed enough to tell me says that there's a reason why the numbers are better. It's catching your eye. Sean: Exactly. Andrew: I never even want to say this publicly, because I don't want to keep people from sending me feedback. Feedback is tremendously helpful and a lot of times, I use their feedback in tests, but testing is so much freaking fun. And it's stuff that, the results are surprising. Sean: it's mind blowing for me the majority of the time. Andrew: What program do you use? I use either Optimizely [sp] or I use Visual Website Optimizer's my favorite one because it's so easy to test. Which one do you use? Which one gets you involved? Sean: My developer likes Google's Optimizer and I think the other ones provide a little bit better. I think I used both of those last year or the year before: Optimizely and Visual. What's the benefit of visual? Does it give you the ability, creates the pages for you and you just drop them in there? Andrew: You just put a little snippet of code on your site and then you never have to say "my developer links" because you get to play with it yourself. It's so easy. It's like, you type the URL of the page you want to change, it shows you on the screen and then it says "what do you want to change?" and using WYSIWYG, very much like. Sean: You just literally go in and change it. Andrew: Yeah. Exactly, you go in and you change it, and you create a variation. And you can do multiple variant tests, you could send some people to a whole other web page. You just come up with whatever stuff you want and it tests it. And you could also say "once you find the winner, a clear statistical winner, just show it to everybody. Don't even bother. And it's wonderful. Sean: But what algorithms do they use for that data? I usually like to see a hundred sales, or two hundred sales. If I'm doing two things, I like to see one hit a hundred before I go with the winner. Andrew: There's no hard and fast rule. I've actually had some tests out there for thousands and because the difference wasn't statistically relevant, even though it seemed high, they didn't kill it, and I remember one time I tested a red button versus a blue button at the top of Mixergy because everyone said red gets you more hits. So I did it. The first day I get 5%, I double my clicks. I thought, 'this is wonderful. Why isn't Visual Website Optimizer canceling it yet? It keeps going, keeps going.' Suddenly it reversed to the mean. I'm talking about weeks have gone by, it reversed to the mean, and then the red does nothing and so now I understand why. The difference looked tremendous to me, but it wasn't statistically relevant, and so they didn't kill the blue and keep the red. They didn't do what done instinctively, and so I like this statistical relevance of it. Sean: I wonder how they know because it sounds like sometimes, through a couple thousand hits, it might make a change, and others might be 10,000 hits or more. I guess I need to get back on it. I loved it. I need to check it out have a conversation [?]. Andrew: Right, I don't want to distract from this. In fact, here, we also have a screen shot. This is one of your tests, and I knew that actually when I saw this, that you guys were using Google. What is this test? Sean: This was, oh, this is interesting. So we went back and switched the header recently. For some reason, I thought we had already done this, but I looked at Linked Influence and the header was still showing up there. One thing I want to point out that I think is relevant here, with this particular example, and I think you have a screen shot of the header versus no header. Andrew: You mean the previous test results? Sean: No, the actual page and how they looked. Andrew: No [?]. Sean: It doesn't matter if you do or not, but what my point is with this, is for some instances and some cases, even if you don't get a better result, it may be worth going with the lesser result, depending on motivation. What I mean by that is, for us, we went ahead and went without the header because the change was big enough, but for some people, they may want that branding. Andrew: Right. Sean: It's important for them that they have their logo and their header at the top, or it's important that one thing looks a certain way because of personal branding, or over the long term, how people view their brand. Just because something converts better doesn't always mean it's better in the long run. Andrew: Right. Sean: So keep that in mind, but with this one, we took the header off. It was pretty substantial. If you look at the data to the right, scroll to the right, you can see the actual numbers in the bottom right-hand corner. I forget where we were. Okay, so you can see here through each page got somewhere around 7,000 hits and you can see there at the bottom, 40% improvement. Andrew: Yeah, and look, even Google of course, does statistical significance here, so chance to beat original and observed improvement. So you're seeing 40% improvement by removing the header? Sean: Is that crazy? Andrew: That is crazy. It makes sense though. Sean: How? How does it make sense? What does it mean? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Andrew: Well, the thing is, what I learned is, I used to think you had to have a big logo on your site, and then what I discovered is, nobody cares what my logo is. Nobody cares what the website is. They care about what's the benefit, and so the smaller the logo is, the more attention they get to pay to the reason they're there... Sean: I see, yeah. Andrew: ...but 40% blows my mind. Sean: That's a lot of data too, to come to that number. Andrew: Yeah. Sean: You can see it. It [?] as much variance from start to finish, so that was a pretty solid test and I didn't get to a hundred on it, but I was like 'you know what, I'm going to go ahead and make the switch. I'm convinced here.' So anyway, testing is so weird and so fun. Andrew: Yeah, right. You spend so much time here with me, you and I are like "Besties". We're practically married. Sean: [?] Andrew: We spent so much time before setting up, grabbing all these screen shots so we wouldn't have to kill bandwidth as you loaded everything up, and it would all be ready to fly in. I appreciate that, and then it's been now an hour and forty minutes since we started recording. I appreciate that too, and more than anything else, because you know I'm anal, I appreciate that you brought a lot of material. I couldn't even fit it all on one big board. We had to have two big boards. Sean: Well, listen, I appreciate you having me on again. I think I told you earlier that I was honored to be on and I love your show, so thanks again for having me on. I hope people have gotten a lot of value out of this. Andrew: I'm sure they have and I'm looking forward to hearing from them what value they got out of it. Come back and let me know, and let Sean know, too, if you're as grateful as I am that he went through so much detail. Shawn, how could connect with you? Sean: Twitter is probably one of the best places, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Claus. Andrew: What's your Twitter handle? Sean: Sean Malarkey [SP]. Andrew: Sean Malarkey [?] for Andrea to play. It's at Sean Malarkey. Sean: Very good. You spelled it right. Andrew: I did? In all fairness, I've been looking at your name on my screen for a long time here today. Sean: Yeah. Andrew: All right, Shawn, thank you really so much for doing this. Sean: For sure. Thanks again for having me. Andrew: Thank you all for watching. See you