How We Will Get 100,000 New Email Subscribers This Year

RT CUSTER (00:00):
Welcome to the Fast Foundation’s podcast. It’s RT and Jim again, today we’re doing this new thing or a new name for the thing that we’ve been doing, and we’re calling it nerding out with RT and Jim. And what are we nerding out about today, Jim?

(00:17):
We are nerding out on something that we have been scheming and refining for quite a while. Likes, I like that word. And building really big lists.

(00:44):
Big list energy. So we’re talking about trying to figure out how to use a personal brand. Cause everyone’s talking about personal brands. Okay. And how do we use a personal brand to grow an email list Significantly. We’re talking, the goal is how do I get just my personal brand and my house list to a hundred thousand email subscribers by the end of 2023? I got a year to do it. We’re running off of a couple assumptions and let me know if I’m missing any assumptions here, Jim. But one is that theoretically it’s cheaper to get a new lead or an a new email address on your list for a personal brand that’s more broad and interesting, like me or you as a personal brand than let’s say Vortic watch company. Like a consumer product that has to be niche and very specific, like you have to, like luxury watches.

(01:48):
So that’s one assumption. The next assumption is that we have everything in front of us to be able to do this with like, nothing that we’re missing. So we have, we have team to help with tech. Um, I, you know, I have you to help with tech from a personal brand standpoint. I have all the equipment and lights and podcast equipment that I need to film a ton of content for it. Um, I like to think I’m a good writer so I can write the emails I’ve done, I’ve built email lists before and we have time and, uh, set aside to, to write, you know, content going forward. And I think those are the assumptions we’re starting with. And also like the bare minimums to, to do something like this. Oh, money. We, we, we have ad ads spend in the budget <laugh>, because if you build it, they will never see it.

(02:44):
They will definitely never come. That if you build it, they will come thing is a hundred percent false. No one will ever see it. So we have ad spend in the budget. That’s the other thing I’ve forgot. I feel like that’s, that’s everything we’re working. And so the point of this episode, the thing we’re nerding out about is how do we build a funnel as a personal brand in order to get a ton of emails. So let’s talk first about why we’re doing this, and then I’m gonna share my screen and you guys can see my shitty handwriting. And Jim, I’m just gonna like, pitch these ideas to you and you can find the holes, find the, the issues, um, let me know what tech we need and, and then I think it’d be fun to kind of document this for everybody of just like, here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. So

(03:36):
definitely, yeah, the, the only thing I wanted to add is we’re approaching this as two entrepreneurs who are partners, who are both marketers who have seen success in this and want to continue it because we built an agency around it. But just because we have extra team, just because we have extra cash for ad spend doesn’t mean that you, the listener or the watcher can’t do it with just yourself or a little bit of guidance or self-paced. Uh, you know, you may not have to, you may not have copywriters on your team. That’s all good. But just the willingness to put it in. And we just wanna show you what’s gonna be working. And the more we can document the better. This is why we do this show. So this is why we wanted to share this. So you got, you can all follow along and you can also ask us questions.

(04:21):
You know, why are you making these choices along the way if we don’t bring it up on the show because we want to get better with it too. If you’ve seen something that is working great, let us know. Hit us in the dms and we’ll continue to refine our path. So yeah, this is gonna be fun. We can do it in real time.

(04:35):
And, and someone asked me the other day, Jim, about like, we, we share so much. Like we basically give everything we do away for free. And that’s from the, the like hor stuff that Hormoze and Gary V and all those guys talk about of just like, you know, if you, if you give away a ton of value and you just share all the things that you’re working on, it, I think builds a lot of trust. And we’re not giving way, like literally click here, do this copy paste level effort.

(05:07):
Like there’s a lot of effort that has to go into it. And I forget wh which one of those guys it was, but somebody said like, 99% of the people that watch the free content and get the free value will do absolutely nothing with it. And so the 1% of the people listening to this and watching this on YouTube that take advantage of all this information and just like, copy paste and be like, okay, cool. I’m gonna do this too. They’re gonna be our clients in the future or they’re gonna outpace us and they’re gonna invest in one of our future companies. So like, if you’re one of those 1%, hell yeah. Copy paste brother, let’s go. You know, I wanna see it. So let’s dive in. Let’s do it.

(05:45):
Let’s check this out.

(05:46):
So sharing my screen for the first time in Riverside as we’re doing this, here we go.

(05:54):
By the way, if you’re new to the show, we use Riverside fm to, uh, to record all the shows, uh, the YouTube channel and everything. We work with the good media, uh, podcast team. And, uh, we just love this as a tool. Like you can use Zoom, you can, you can go goal, you know, you can do it however you want. But, uh, this platform is just really optimized for the way that we now have our workflows to get these shows out the door. And, uh, today we are trying some new tech, which is that big old screen share button on this thing. So we shall see what happens. So if you’re not subscribed on YouTube, check out this version on YouTube if you’re not already watching. Thank you if you are. But, uh, we love you on the podcast, but we got some visuals on the YouTube.

(06:33):
Um, I always do my hair for you, so it’s one bonus

(06:36):
and we’ll, we’ll do the best we can for people just listening so that you can go back and see these visuals later. You don’t want to print out of this because you won’t be able to read my handwriting.

(06:46):
Yeah, but this is definitely not an opt-in, no <laugh>.

(06:50):
This is not a free download. This is my having breakfast, thinking about what we’re talking about today. Scribble on a fricking remarkable tablet. PS dm e if you want my remarkable affiliate link cuz this thing is awesome. Separately though, the point of this, the other reason why so goal up here is, is build my personal brand funnel in 2023. How do we get a hundred thousand email subscribers? But Jim, the way I was thinking about this is like, first of all, we can do this for you as well and the bottom of the funnel that you and I haven’t talked about yet.

(07:25):
I think it’d be a really cool thing for other affiliates, like our Fast Foundations affiliates. Um, I, I wanna start an affiliate program for Vortic, like giving people a really cool reason to do that. And I want to treat me and like my personal brand as an influencer, like affiliate marketer. So that’s, we’re basing all this on. And when you talk about affiliate marketing, you talk about paid traffic a lot of times. So we will run ads on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, probably starting with just Instagram and Facebook to try it out, make sure it works first, and then roll it out on those other platforms and test cost per click. Kind of figure that out and like the value of, of those clicks. And the example I’m gonna run through is one of the last episodes that, that you and I did was our favorite email newsletters.

(08:21):
So we talked about the hustle and all that kind of stuff and we’ll build the next step. So like quick example, advertising, paid traffic, you get an Instagram ad that’s from my personal profile. So it’s RT Custer on Instagram, which is kind of cool when you think about it because I’ll also be buying followers in some way because some people are gonna click on the ad and some people might just like follow me on Instagram, which is great. So I’ll grow that organic reach, um, as well, you know, ancillary, ancillary instead of word I just used it,

(08:55):
it is now.

(08:56):
So that’s kind of cool. But the ad will be like, Hey, Jim and I put together our list of favorite email newsletters. If you get the news from email like you do, like we do, then click on my face and check out this landing page.

(09:11):
We put ’em all in one place. Click on my face, we put on one place. I like that. We got it.

(09:16):
You just got the tagline figure.

(09:17):
I was gonna say we gotta record that, but we’re recording here. We’re it’s

(09:19):
recorded. Yep. This is why we’re doing it.

(09:21):
That’s it. So, um, then when you click on my face and you head to the landing page, um, Jim, you can kind of help me describe like, and I, I actually made a, a visual of a, of an educational landing page, but I have an educational landing page here slash microsite and my thought is like the best email newsletters for the busy entrepreneurs at the top. And then we basically use the podcast episode as content and then we have affiliate links out to like the hustle and any of those newsletters that give us some incentive to, to share them.

(10:03):
But to me that landing page is like really simple and probably just built on carterandcuster.com, like WordPress I think.

(10:11):
Yeah,

(10:12):
right.

(10:12):
Couple couple quick ways we can do that and uh, we’ll we’ll dive into all of these, but it’s the combination of either having a landing page or a microsite and both have benefits so we can explore that as we get into this.

(10:23):
Sweet. And this is kind of what I’m, I’m kind of like skipping ahead on my list here, but this is kind of what’s in my head. So for the educational landing page, and it’s all about education here, right? So we’re giving away a ton of value to hopefully build trust with the audience. So this is, and I was, I was really hoping we could screen share using my remarkable cause I was gonna draw hair on, on this one and just like a ball cap on this one for you Jim,

(10:48):
be perfect.

(10:48):
But this is me and Jim on, on YouTube. So we like literally embed the YouTube video of the best email newsletters episode right here. We say watch it on YouTube or listen here, this top of this landing page is gonna give us credibility, I think of just like, okay, we’re not just messing around, we’re not just some random blog on the internet that’s saying these are good newsletters for entrepreneurs. We’re two entrepreneurs talking about how we get our news from email, from these newsletters. And we had a whole like 35 minute episode on YouTube you can watch about it. And then I was thinking, Jim, we put like my favorite and your favorite like at the top almost microsite style. And then like, my favorite to the hustle, little paragraph and my words about why, and then a subscribe to the Hustle Link. Same thing for you.

(11:35):
What was your favorite? What what Like from that episode,

(11:38):
now I’m going back, trying to remember

(11:39):
when you have the spot.

(11:40):
Yeah, you are. I think it was either the Product Hunt, oh, email newsletter or it might have been one called Marketing Max. There was a couple of them, but

(11:54):
product time’s Cool.

(11:55):
Yeah. Product on one’s fun. Just a really good pulse on all the tech stuff that’s going out because that’s, that’s the content that I put out is Daily Tech tips and you know, just teaching what I see that can help entrepreneurs along the way.

(12:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, the landing page is, is I mean, hyper simple like YouTube video, couple calls to action, like education, just here’s what we talked about. Um, and this is just one example, like the best email newsletters is probably not the best example as far as like clickability.

(12:28):
Like somebody’s not every single person gonna click. Like we’ll probably spend more cost per click wise on something like this. But we have a huge list of other ideas and that we can Ritz and repeat on this and the value of this person that’s on this landing page. Like if you see an ad about email newsletters for the busy entrepreneur and you click on it, you are our people. Like you’re the type of person that’s listening to this podcast. You’re the type of person that would want to, um, come to a Fast Foundations event. You might want to, you know, join us in our agency as, as a, as an employee maybe, or as, um, a client. You know, all the, you are our people if you’re, if you care about this kind of stuff. So I think whatever it costs to get a click to this is, is worth it will have an email signup call to action here.

(13:14):
So like, if you’re on this page and you want to learn more about all the other stuff we do, you can click here and then we’ll have the full blog with affiliate links to all the other things we talked about, pictures, all that kind of stuff. This is basically a podcast landing page like advertising this podcast that we did.

(13:34):
And on that point about having the blog at the end, so this is really key is when you’re listening to this, when you’re watching this, you’re thinking, Jesus, this is, this is a lot of work to put it all together. I need prep time, I need to record it. I need to write a full blog. You don’t, what you need to do is think about what is it that your target avatar is looking for and why you are the source expert and why you already have that answer and you want to give it to ’em.

(13:56):
And I’m gonna rewind and explain why that’s that’s real. Because when we were trying to think about what that episode was, when RT and I recorded our favorite newsletters, we prepped that damn thing an hour before we actually hit record, right? We started a Google doc, we went through our email, we said, what are we reading? What are we like, what’s unread? What’s, what is,

(14:11):
this is generous Jim, maybe gen

(14:13):
Yeah, I can say pointing us. Okay. Yeah. Maybe a little bit.

(14:16):
Maybe you in time. Maybe maybe you did an hour. I I was like, oh shit, we’re talking about this today.

(14:21):
Yeah, you guys have met me. So that’s, that’s how we roll <laugh>.

(14:23):
And you guys have met me, we put it together

(14:26):
and we hit record and we had a great conversation if you listened to it. We like, we started getting some feedback.

(14:31):
Who likes what? And the power of repurposing is, is, is massive. So we spent what, 45, 60 minutes talking about the purposes of all of these and what we like about it. We had so many great things that we shared about these newsletters. If all you did was run that through something like rev.com you transcribed. Use ai, whatever it takes. You’ve got thousand words, 2000 words, maybe even 2,500 that you can just plug in there. And it’s all great content. Doesn’t have to be perfect. And that’s what we wanna do, is we wanna show you with this funnel that no matter what you have, no matter what you’re putting out there, as long as you’re willing to, to, to get that out of your head and show that you are that source expert on a key topic, this is one example of what could be countless implementations of it.

(15:17):
You make it, once you duplicate it, you keep pouring the fuel on that fire.

(15:21):
Hey it’s rt. Thanks so much for listening to the Fast Foundation’s podcast. I want to see you in the room. I don’t want you to just be hearing my and our voices. Let me tell you about the Fast Foundation’s Mastermind. It’s a six month long program and it’s our signature program. It’s how you join our community every time we talk about it’s amazing community of almost 400 people that have gone through our mastermind that we have here on the podcast that we hear from and our mentors, all that kind of stuff. All the guest speakers, the coaches, all the awesome things that we get to do. It all starts with the Mastermind. It’s a six month long program with two two day in-person events, one’s in Scottsdale, one’s in Denver.

(16:06):
Yes, they’re in amazing beautiful places. We have them in cool spots because that’s fun. We also give you six months with a coach one-on-one. And the most important thing is once you go through that mastermind and you learn from all these amazing speakers that we bring in, learn from your coach, grow with me and Jim and the rest of our team, you get lifetime access to our community. Every single thing that we do is recorded and uploaded into a private platform off of Facebook, off of the social medias, all that kind of crap. And it’s saved in one place that you have again, lifetime access to. So when you join the Fast Foundations Mastermind, which you can learn more about at fastfoundations.com and click on join the community to apply when you join this mastermind, you are in our community for life. I really hope to see you in the room and I hope to talk to you soon.

(17:03):
So after they hit the landing page, either they’re going to take action and read it, watch it, listen to it, all that kind of stuff. Or they’re gonna hit our call to action. We’ll probably have a popup on the page two to try to get their email address. Maybe they’ll give us their email address organically. Super cool if they do save us some time and effort and money. If they don’t though, we’re going to use step three, which is retention.com. So I guess I included organic email signup here. That’s gonna be a really low percentage of people that organically sign up. Those are truly our people and that’s awesome and you’re saving us money if you just type your email address in there. But retention.com Jim, we’ll have to do a whole separate episode about that, maybe,

(17:46):
maybe a whole series as we get into this. yeah

(17:48):
I I wanna see if I can get Adam on the podcast to talk about it. The founder, cuz he, well I sent you, we, yeah, we’ve had like several conversations about how freaking cool that dude is. But if you don’t know what retention.com is, um, in a nutshell in the United States and only in the United States, if you hit a landing page, I know well the algorithm that retention.com developed knows who you are based on your IP address and knows your email address based on all kinds of other algorithmic functions and technology. That’s way above my head. And if you have subscribed and interacted with, engaged with another major email newsletter in the last two weeks, like you subscribed to the Hustle or some big email newsletter like that, or another huge e-commerce brand, your email address is most likely on this massive list that retention.com owns.

(18:51):
It’s hundreds of millions of email addresses and they cross reference that list and they sell us your email address for, I don’t know, Jim, 25 cents. Make that. Yeah,

(19:03):
yeah. It’s one of those pennies to the dollar type type of a metric. Yeah.

(19:06):
And, and at scale it’s way less literally pennies. And we put your email address on our list without you having to type it in on the website. Some of you are listening to this going like, huh, that seems different, you know, and is that legal? You know, that’s a really good question. Adam, the founder of retention.com did a hold podcast. That’s how I heard about it. There was literally like this sneaky but legal way to grow your email list. And so that’s what got me in like six months ago. And I’ve been just like down the rabbit hole researching this thing.

(19:42):
Cause it’s super cool. And so others of you are like, holy shit, this is, this is amazing <laugh>. And you’re like me and you’re like, oh my God. Um, we’re gonna get so many emails off of this and you’re like, me and you, you immediately install it on your website and test it and test the heck out of it and figure out how to like optimize this thing and, and learn how to use it. And so anyway, when you hit this landing page, that obviously is gonna look nicer than this, but it’s just, just like this that you’re seeing right now. It’s me and Jim just talking about something that’s educational. We’re educating you on the best email newsletters. All of a sudden you are going to get an automated email that says, thank you for visiting the site. And you’re gonna be like, holy shit, how did you get my email?

(20:33):
Unless you organically signed up, which thank you again, you just saved us that money and time is great, but most people that we use retention.com to get the email address from, which I feel like they said to expect about 20% of the website visitors will get their email address sweet.

(20:51):
Like 20 and 30, I think 30 was the highest metric I ever saw them talk about.

(20:55):
Yeah. So if we’re paying 25 cents to get them to the p to the website and then we get one in every five email addresses, that means we’re paying a dollar 25 to get that email address on our list plus retention dot com’s fee. So now we’re up to a dollar 50 to get that email, um, on our list. But just, you know, for reference, I’ve, I’m used to paying him a five or $6 an email address for a really good lead for like Vortic, right for example.

(21:28):
And so this is amazing. And then you are going to get an automated email filter. So this is a journey and it’s all gonna be from me. So from RT Custer, I’m thinking I’ll use rtcuster.com or something like that. And the first email’s gonna say thank you for visiting the site. And then there’s gonna be a little video and a question. It’s gonna say, how’d you get my, i I bet you’re wondering how did you get my email address? And then I’m gonna point you to a podcast that we haven’t recorded yet, but we will by this time, um, where Jim and I talk about retention.com and how awesome it is. And just in integrity, this is a software that we use to get your email address. It’s awesome. If you don’t think it’s awesome, big old unsubscribe button right here or reply and tell me that you hate me.

(22:19):
Totally fine. I accept that. Or

(22:21):
we’re, we’re both fathers, we welcome judgment

(22:23):
a hundred percent. Or you’re like, this is the coolest thing that’s ever happened in the entire face of the planet because you’re like us and you like marketing and marketing hacks and things like this. And you’re gonna read on and then you’re gonna get multiple email addresses about who I am and why you should give a shit about me and all the things that I do and the stuff that I like. Basically educational, entertaining emails about the things that that I do and the things that I do with Jim and things that I do with my business partner Tyler, at Vortic watch company and what Fast Foundations is and all that stuff. And there’s gonna be affiliate links in every single one of those emails. I’ll have like three to, I was thinking three to 10 emails.

(23:06):
They’re all automated and it just tells you about my life and it’s just my voice and saying, Hey, these are the things they do. And it’ll be a bunch of call to action links over to join the Fast Foundations community. That’s our call to action for Fast Foundations. Join the community. And then that’s gonna take you to an affiliate link for Fast Foundations and start like the rest of the funnel. So here’s where there’s kind of like a divide here. So if you don’t click on any of these emails and you just kind of continue and you don’t unsubscribe, then you’re going to hit my house list and I’m gonna send a weekly email newsletter to, there’s, there’s gonna be, let’s zoom out for a second. There’s probably gonna be 10 funnels like this. So one through four, like 10 different funnels, best email newsletters, my favorite softwares for the busy entrepreneur, uh, my favorite productivity products like Remarkable that I used for this.

(24:04):
All kinds of different funnels. That’s, that’s for preneur, the entrepreneurial side of things. And then I’ll have a whole separate set of funnels for Vortic. And I drew out a couple of those cuz I think that’ll be kind of fun to talk about. But if you don’t unsubscribe from any of this, then you’ll hit my weekly email newsletter that I send to my house list. And that’s just me speaking to my people. They’re just like, Hey, you know, thanks for following along. I talk about Vortic, I talk about Fast Foundations, I talk about Carter and custer agency. I share these episodes of the cool things that Jim and I talk about. Other things that I like with Affiliate Links, launches. You know, every time we talk about a new retreat or event for Fast Foundations, I’ll send a lot of information about that. I now have a house list and that’s the goal up here.

(24:49):
A hundred thousand people on that list by the end of the year. The power of that list is insane <laugh>. Like if we have a hundred thousand people on an email list for a personal brand q Imagine Jim. Like holy shit,

(25:01):
I can, can’t wait. This is why we’re doing it.

(25:03):
It’s stoked. Stoked. So anyway, here’s the new idea that we haven’t even talked about yet. So the bottom of this funnel, so you’re gonna get a bunch of emails, I’m gonna talk about Fast Foundations, we’re gonna test it as me. So I’m think of, think of Me even though I’m co-owner of Fast Foundations as just an affiliate of Fast Foundations. So you’ll go to fastfoundation.com/rtcuster and then there’s gonna be a video of me on the Fast Foundation’s website and super simple landing page like everything above these lines, like just this. And she’s gonna be like, Hey, I’m RT, let me tell you about Fast Foundations, why it’s so awesome, why I joined, why I’m an affiliate for it, why I love it so much.

(25:47):
Only one thing I need you to do. Sign up for Fast Foundation’s email list underneath. They’ll tell you everything about it. It’s awesome. We’re gonna get that person’s email from my house list from this funnel that we’re talking about today onto the Fast Foundation’s email list. And now I’ve just converted. That’s like the true conversion we’re looking for here. This is the conversion event and we’re working with some really cool software to like track all this shit. But here’s the new idea, Jim, besides the video and all this stuff, what if affiliates get money for every single email sign up? They send our way, not just the percentage of the sale that we already give them for becoming a customer. So let’s use Chris Harder as an example. He’s an affiliate for Fast Foundations or all of our affiliates get 10% of the sales they bring in.

(26:47):
But like Fast Foundations is not an inexpensive thing. It’s, it’s kind of like vortic, you know, you can use Vortic as an example too. And Chris again as an as an example for that, let’s, let’s actually use Chris and Vortic as an example. So what if you landed on vortec watches.com/chris harder and then you got a video from Chris saying like, Hey the Vortic watch company email newsletter is one of the only ones I open every week from a, from a luxury brand. RT writes them still, it’s fricking awesome. And he would save us cuz he’s said this to me like they’re good emails. You should sign up for the email and learn more about this watch I have on my wrist. Then I pay him for that email sign up and when that person converts six, 12 months later, he gets a percentage of the sale as well.

(27:38):
I feel like we could have hundreds of affiliates for this kind of thing if we basically double incentivize them. So it’s a constant incentive and a percent of sale. So what are your thoughts on the tech of that, Jim? Because in my head it’s freaking sweet <laugh>, but like we gotta track it.

(27:56):
Yeah, yeah, it’s all totally doable. And real quick before I answered that, it’s to zoom out, this is one of many types of strategies that all accomplish the same thing, but this is the kind of stuff that lights us up that we’re really excited about and is really trending for 2023 and where we’re going. So the, this whole thought of, you know, retention.com and you know, this kind of like cost conversion and everything you guys are, at the end of the day, it’s no different than running a sweepstakes and batch infusing a ton of emails into your list.

(28:28):
It’s no different

(28:29):
than, well, geez, we’re already talking about kind of cpc like paying people to be affiliates, you know, to add to your list. There’s also a growing trend and we’re talking about email newsletters, which is now a lot of newsletters cross pollinate, other newsletters who are friends. So very similar here would be like Chris has a house list for, so for one of his emails or a series of his emails to go out and say, by the way, here’s some of my other favorites. You should go check these out. You better believe that those are paid sponsorships, those are ads. So, You know, it may sound sneaky, but again, legal, all of these are legal things and they’re, you all are doing it from a permission base. If you don’t want that, if that person doesn’t wanna be on there, then they just, they just hit bounce.

(29:09):
So I like it. And I just wanted to touch on that point that there are so many ways that you can build these funnels. We are just starting with something that is really exciting and something brand new. So,

(29:19):
and it’s really not that difficult. Like the, when I, when I’ve been building this out, it’s, it’s a lot and that’s why I, I drew it out and, you know, I, we will run through another example. I want to use Vortic as an example on like another landing page here in a second. But, um, as I’m building this out, I’m just like, okay, I need, I need Jim’s advice and help and the team’s advice and help around the tech and like what are we building the landing pages on and then what email service provider are we using? But like, I can record the ads, I can write every word of content on all of these landing pages and emails myself, cuz it’s just me talking about my own personal brand.

(29:58):
So super straightforward and then I can sell the shit out of this to other affiliates and other people that might be interested because now I’m not just giving them a percentage of sales, like most affiliate programs do, I’m actually gonna pay them cents. But like, uh, in not insignificant amount of money per email address that signs up. So now they get just literal cash every single day from, you know, from this. So none of it’s really, besides the tech for me that difficult and I feel like this is all super achievable for everyone. So that’s why I wanted to do an episode like this. So it’s just like, hey, let’s just put it out there because I’m sure someone’s listening to this or watching this and saying like, Hey, this is cool, have you thought about that? And that’s, I love those conversations of like, what if we did this too?

(30:42):
It’s like, oh shit, okay. That, that’s how we’ve gotten this far <laugh>.

(30:47):
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let’s, let’s just dive right in and, and just, just talk about the tech that we need to actually get, get this done. So looking at that example, right? We’re talking about having source content, expanding on that content, providing value and saying, Hey, if you’re just didn follow along, So can we knock out a one pager that talks about all this? Yes, you can do that in many different ways. You can, if you have a, if you work with Squarespace, you just fire up a page on Squarespace. If you’re on Wix, you just fire up a a site there. We use WordPress primarily just so we have full creative control and technical control, but also site speed is really important to us and we just optimize the hell out of all of that.

(31:27):
Um, we use a service called Elementor for a lot of our page layouts to make it really great. And these days elements are even has like a cloud site feature, which is really cool and brand new. It’s like 29 bucks or something like that. It’s super cheap. You can even just knock out a one pager and let them handle it all the hostings. So there’s so many options for that. If you’re interested in ideas about how to launch a landing page, listen to the other one, um, uh, CNC episode that we had about building fast foundations. We talk about a lot of things that go into that. So that’s number one. Yes, we can set that up. Do you need it to be in integrated into a crm and does it have to be all connected? No, it doesn’t. What we’re talking about here is having one of multiple future lead sources where everything goes into one single email list provider, right?

(32:12):
This doesn’t have to be fully integrated, you don’t have to have a global dashboard. We’re just talking about building your email list. So there’s nothing back there

(32:18):
. We don’t, we probably don’t even need any zap ears for this if we do it right,

(32:21):
it’s like [inaudible] hack because I’m just, I’m, I’m having you sign up for one email list and then I’m telling you about other email lists and sending you to other landing pages where then you would manually sign up. And that’s, that’s the other cool thing is when I learned about this retention.com stuff before I was like, this is really cool, I’m okay with receiving an email from someone that says, Hey rt, I hate you and I I want to come shit on your porch because you got my email address. Without my permission, I, I can read an email like that and say, Hey, thank you so much for your feedback.

(32:55):
Have a nice life. I don’t want that energy. Even if it’s 1%. Which it is like, you know, I, I tested this on, on Vortic for just two weeks and we got 4,000 emails and I, um, email addresses, email signups, 50 some percent open rate on the first email. It’s stupid, crazy. And then one person sent me an email and said, how’d you get my email address? And I had a really good conversation with them and they actually are still on the list. And it was like, fine. They were just like, how, how does, like this is, I’m, I’m too really curious, abouit it

(33:26):
stoked, Yeah.

(33:27):
Um, but I don’t want that any kind of negativity associated with a luxury brand. So, but I, I actually do want that, um, energy associated with me and my personal brand because I love marketing hacks. I love this stuff.

(33:43):
I love talking about it. And so I think the separation of just like, here’s the, the personal brand funnel and I’m using some of these hacks and some of these cool things that maybe don’t make sense to some people. And then I’m saying if you wanna learn more about one of my brands, then it’s just a simple, easy normal signup. And I’m also not stopping any of the massive marketing engine that I already developed for Vortic. We’re still running ads directly to that website. We’re running retargeting ads to that website the whole time. Like there’s so much of that still happening. This is just one new way to drive traffic basically.

(34:21):
That’s it. Let’s see. So we got landing page, you’ve got email software where everything kind of filtering into that. Uh, you have the ability to embed whatever we record and put it in one place.

(34:34):
Uh, the go back on your list. So there was a couple other things we were talking about. Oh, the affiliate side. So something else we talked about on the building Fast foundation site is we love affiliate programs. RT and I have a lot of experience with it over the years. We’ve done it a lot of different ways. One of the greatest things about that is you are commissioning people to be your marketing army. So the more that you can do to incentivize somebody to actually talk about something that they love always the better. Now in this particular case, we use what’s called affiliate wp. And that is, again, we talked about that on the building fastfoundations.com episode. The what’s great about that is not only can we offer that 10% for anything that is true conversions, but we can set up a different conversion.

(35:17):
I don’t wanna call it a funnel, but let’s call it like a, let’s just call it like an offline conversion. Like that concept of it doesn’t require something to happen in real time, but when there’s a click, it does something else. So that might require a little bit of a zap or it might require just a little bit of custom code. I’m gonna have to check with the tech team on that. But you know, what do we want to pay per conversion? You want it to be 5 cents, 10 cents a dollar, whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is, but whatever it is that we’re gonna set up, we just need a way to say, great, every time this link is clicked in a unique fashion, that person’s cookie, we understand that that person again then gets that credit, you set the parameters of it and you let the affiliate program do all the work.

(35:55):
So I absolutely see that as something we can add in now or we can actually just kind of dry run it, see what the clicks look like, and then we can go from there. And then from then that person is just building up the cash that we owe them. And in our affiliate program we just pay out quarterly. It’s really simple. At any time they can jump in, they can check out with their balances and the affiliate emails we send to our affiliates, we always just highlight. It’s just kind of a nice to have we highlight what their current running, uh, commission is to high more highly incentivize them that they’re making money with our program.

(36:27):
Yep. Yeah. And I, you know, I don’t know Jim how much to pay per email address, but that’s why I was thinking of let’s dry run this with like my personal brand and kind of see what it costs to get to that step in the funnel and then, and then make a decision.

(36:44):
But let’s say it’s 25 cents, you know, people can make, uh, hundreds of dollars a month just sending traffic to us and using their affiliate link for Fast Foundations and then for for Vortic, like I just think this could be so big and, and I think, you know, linking this to Shopify and Clavio might require some code and some, some hacks in some way.

(37:11):
It’s all do. But like they’re all big enough those companies where there’s options, right?

(37:16):
Yeah. Even if we have to Zapier some stuff around, um, I, I think there’s, I’m sure there’s a way to to to say, okay, Chris Harder sent this person over to Vortec, they signed up for the vortic email list, we give Chris a dollar for that. Thank you sir. And then that person that Chris referred six months from now purchases a watch for $5,000. We send Chris 500, thank you again.

(37:43):
you know, um, as Chris as the affiliate marketer, that’s really cool. Nobody does that. That’s the, the part of this that I’m really excited about. It’s just that extra incentive. It’s not just a percentage, it’s like ongoing. Cuz I, I want to take this idea and pitch it to like Kevin O’Leary cuz we already have a video of Kevin O’Leary talking about how much he likes Foric watches and how cool our stuff is. So I can be like, Kevin, you have a million views on your YouTube video already sending me free traffic. I want to pay you for some of that traffic. Like no, who’s gonna say no? That

(38:19):
right.

(38:19):
You know?

(38:19):
Right.

(38:20):
So, um, anywho

(38:22):
no. Another thing we can do, another thing we can do in, uh, just for listeners and watchers here too is if the whole idea of the tech that goes behind doing these one-off clicks to give some kind of an affiliate thing is too much scroll that just pay somebody a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, okay, 500 bucks, whatever, and just come up with the terms.

(38:40):
It’s no different than having an influencer agreement or something like that. Like if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna pay RT or me, you know, a grand to, you know, to promote your product and be a sponsored post or whatever that is on Instagram, it’d be no different. You just, you have terms of the commitment. You say, here’s a bunch of words you can use. Here’s all the links you need. Here’s a care package of assets and everything else. You’re gonna do that anyways if you don’t already have it. And just offer that. Come up with simple terms. And then the best part about that is in the affiliate world, all those clicks end up cooking them. Anyways, that’s, that’s the whole point of the affiliate program. What you’re doing is you’re prepaying for somebody to execute a contract. No different than if you hired a contractor to do something on your house, your website, anything in between.

(39:20):
And now you’re helping to make yourself more sales if you are that affiliate. So you can keep it really simple. That’s probably what we’ll do to get started and that’s how we’ll measure what the cost is. And then when we know what the averages are, then we’ll bubble it up and we’ll automate it

(39:35):
and we can track, like you said, we can track the cost per lead on, on both sides. So, you know, some, some people get paid per email address that signs up plus a percentage of sales. And then some people were just like, Hey, we’ll give you 300 bucks to, to post once a week, you know, for a month. Right? Something like that. Um, and we make some assumptions around how much traffic they’re gonna drive, how many conversions we’re gonna get from that traffic. And then we just do that math and you know, a lot of times that might add up to be a similar number.

(40:09):
And then the other thing that I was thinking here is instead of straight up affiliates, and we’ll do this, SRI of affiliates are great too, but this could be a new and different way to sponsor podcasts. So like we can say to one of our friends that has a decent size podcast, you know, you are, you’re an affiliate for us. Um, and you can post about us and you get kickback from that. But what if the episode was sponsored by us? Use, use your affiliate link and now you don’t just get a percentage of sales, which happens infrequently. You also get a literal dollar figure for every single email that signs up. And the only thing we hear about is that first touchpoint. We just want their email address. Um, I just think that that’s such an easier sell than a percentage of sales.

(40:56):
And you know, the, the other thing about this with, with this funnel, which I love and we didn’t talk about paid traffic yet, but the idea here is that you are either paying your current constituents, people that are in your close network, you know, your, your your closest people who wanna support you anyways. So they wanna support you now from a commission basis or you have a flame and you just want paid traffic to turn it into a bonfire, right?. And the beautiful thing about when you get something like this set up with the tech is now whoever lands on that site from whatever source they come from, the goal is still an email. You’re just trying to get in there. And by the way, I talk about text me text message marketing a lot, this could work with texting as well.

(41:37):
A hundred percent copy and paste. yep

(41:39):
It it’s, it’s the same stuff and it probably should be both, right? Like I’ve, I’ve built my list to be able to send out to, you know, people on my like daily text tech tips, but there’s no reason it can’t be over email too. That’s one of the things we’re gonna do for me rt. I see no reason why we couldn’t actually talk about marketing stuff on text for you. It’s one more method, one more channel at the end of the day, no matter where that person consumes your content, the goal is to bring them back and we just wanna get ’em on a house list that email list,

(42:07):
you know, it might be kind of cool Jim if like, we built this all via email for, or based on email for my brand and then we copy and paste and do it all text for you.

(42:18):
Cuz you, you already send those message. Like I just, I want to stay in my lane as far as like I’m already writing and sending emails all the time and I love that style of marketing and you are already doing those texts and they’re awesome. So like maybe that’s the CTA for, for your landing pages that that would kinda be cool that see how much it costs to get a phone number versus an email address.

(42:40):
Yeah, for sure. We could put the into the conversion. Yep.

(42:43):
Yep. Yeah, that’d be cool. So, and, and if one of them works better, we just literally take that form off, put a new form on and hit go right? Like it’s super simple. So let’s um, for the people that are like still saying, okay, cool dude, but like how do I do this for my consumer product brand for instance?

(43:05):
Or can we use a real example? Let’s use Vortic. So for those that don’t know, I run Vortic watch company as well. It’s vorticwatches.com. We make the coolest and best watches in the entire world here in Fort Collins, Colorado. Um, and my, this, this is where this whole idea came from. So picture this americanmadewatches.us.pro, it doesn’t matter, the domain doesn’t matter at all.

(43:32):
Todd American flag.

(43:33):
Yes. American. Yeah, just, yeah, there’s a s wav

(43:37):
flag emoji.

(43:38):
Yeah, there’s a flyover, there’s an F 35 just cruising, hovering behind the, I tell best American Made watches is at the top right? And then you get an ad on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok maybe if I want to go for that audience and it’s me and I’m just like, Hey guys, I’ve been in the watch industry for a decade. I’ve seen all the watches.

(44:02):
A lot of people talk about American made watches. I put all the best American made watches in one place just for you. Check it out, click on my face. Right? And this is what that landing page looks like. So I’ll put a list of actually made in u s a watches. So there’s only three, and Jim, I don’t know if you knew this, but there’s only three companies that make a watch in America. Like truly can, can like write made in USA on the back of a watch. And this is what I’m talking about as far as education. Cuz if I start with education, then if I get your email address without your permission, you’re probably a little more likely to be like, you know what, I like this guy, I like this information, I wanna learn more. I’m not gonna be like, this is interesting.

(44:49):
Or you might be like, was I drunk? Like I, did I sign up for this email? This,

(44:54):
what did I actually,

(44:55):
I love watches. Like I love American made. So anyway, you, you land on this page, you, you see my face on some, you know, advertising platform. You say, okay, yeah, I like American watches, I’m gonna check this out. You land on this page, I educate you just in integrity. Like this is what I do, this is what I’ve learned. Here are the three companies in the world that make watches in America. My company that I own is one of them. You don’t know who I am or that I own that company yet, but like there it is. I made a video on what made in USA means as it pertains to watches on YouTube already, it’s already up there. So I’ll put that here and then I’ll put a little list together of brands that are assembled in America.

(45:37):
It’s like if you care but you don’t care that much, you’re like, ah, I don’t wanna spend thousands of dollars to be made in America. What about assembled in America? It’s like, okay, here’s a list of 10, 20 companies like that. Sorry, I’m skipping ahead. Go back. So, um, we have a list of assembled in America companies here. And then below that I can say also, if you don’t care that much at all, you’re just like, I just wanna support an American brand. It’s like, oh well here’s a bunch of just cool American based companies like, you know, fossil and Timex that like they’re made in China, but like it’s a cool watch and its American company to like, you know, if you care, there you go. So it’s just a educational landing page on all things American watches. If you click on that and you land on this page, you are my target demographic for what I’m looking for for Vortic watch company period.

(46:27):
Like amazing. All of these links are as many as I can. I’ll make them affiliates. So I can’t get affiliates to some of my competitors here, um, because these are really small companies, but I bet a bunch of these companies down here have affiliate links. So I, even if I’m accidentally selling one of my competitor’s brands and selling a competitor’s watch like Shinola, I could accidentally sell a Shinola watch on Amazon and I’ll get 5% of that sale accidentally. So that’s cool as part of this funnel. And then I’ll put retention.com algorithm on this page. I’ll obtain their email address using that system and then I’ll put ’em through a filter. So you’ll get these emails. So I’m just gonna start right off the bat. I’m in this way. We’re not educating the customer on what retention.com is. They, they don’t give a shit like they’re just here to learn about American watches.

(47:20):
So I’ll say, what does American made mean? And they’ll say, thank you for visiting my site. My name’s RT, it’s all from RT Custer, it’s not from Vortic, it’s not from let’s just like, hey, here’s why I care about this. Right? And then brands that are actually made here, again, I’m, we talked about how much effort this may or may not be. I’m basically using the same information that I already put together on the landing page and chopping it up into five different emails. So you’re gonna get an email that’s brands that are actually made here, a third email that’s brands that are assembled here. It’s the same information, I’m just delivering it via email instead of just on that landing page. Most people don’t, won’t scroll past the first scroll on that landing page. So they’ll be like, oh cool, I got an email with just that information.

(48:01):
Perfect. And then on the fifth email or so, I’ll be like, this is why I care, by the way, I’m RT, [inaudible] Vortic Watch company. It’s one of the few American made watch companies. And then I’ll send a couple other emails on like, here’s why that’s important, why you should care and more about vortic. And then the call to action on a lot of those emails is check out Vortic. And then same deal when they go to Vortic, they’ll hit a landing page that slash my name and then I as the affiliate for vortec will get a, you know, dollar figure probably, I was thinking a dollar cuz these leads are amazing. A dollar per email and a percentage of sales over time. So that’s how the funnel would work for Vortic Watch company, a consumer product brand. And then I’m just, I’m really excited about this affiliate thing.

(48:49):
Like I wanna go to Chris and some of my other friends that like watches that already have Vortic watch and say like, Hey, let me build a quick landing page for you on Vortic’s website. Will you record a quick welcome video that says, Hey, I get these emails from Vortec every week. They’re amazing. You should really sign up. That’s all I need from you. And they don’t pay you <laugh>. So, um, that’s really the, the next step and I guess the other side of the funnel, right? We had, here’s what it’s like for a service business and how we run it through for a personal brand and then here’s what it’s like for a personal brand into consumer product funnel.

(49:24):
Yeah, it’s awesome man. I’m here for it. And the best part about that is it doesn’t require any more tech than we’ve already even talked about for the others.

(49:30):
This is actually the easiest implementation of a lead page. Great. It’s starting with a page plugging in your content lists, words, links, you know, all that. All that is very low tech and setting it up and then it’s having a button which is likely given to you by whatever your email service provider’s gonna be. So in this case, if it’s your houseless, it’s whatever that is. If it’s sending people off to Vortex directly, then it’s just gonna be whatever Vortic is gonna be on. So there is no tech that should stand in the way of making those and then building it once and then just duplicating it as many times as we need.

(50:02):
Hundred percent. Yep. And, and Vortic on Shopify and we use Clavio and then retention.com said to only use Clavio for the welcome emails. Um, Clavio is the best, but you know, it’s, it’s great.

(50:15):
It’s for them. I’m using one ESP for the whole thing. So I’m gonna use Clavio for my personal brand and we already use that for Vortec. And then like, it doesn’t really matter what the brands themselves use. So like when we send the the traffic over to Fast Foundations, fast foundation’s email service provider can be anything. It doesn’t matter. You’re like you said, you’re just putting in a little, um, signup form. So anyway, yeah. I’m stoked about it. And that’s, that’s it. So I think we can just, I mean we’re gonna literally like stay on this video call and just start building shit. So.

(50:51):
Yep. Today’s workshop day next and we wanted to document for everybody on the show and just show what we’re working on. So we’ll, uh, we’re, we’ll have to record, uh, at least monthly updates how it’s pro, how it’s progressing, how it’s tracking, maybe share some costs, uh, things like that.

(51:06):
So you guys, if, uh, stuff like this is interesting, just DM us. Let us know, uh, what you think. You can find RT on, uh, Instagram at RT Custer. You can find me on Instagram at Cause Hacker. Uh, you know how to get ahold of us. Everything’s in our profiles, but we, we love sharing this stuff. You know, it’s, it’s in our nature to to, to share what we know, and that’s why we’re doing the show. And we also just want to put it in practice and show you that it’s possible even on a budget.

(51:32):
A hundred percent. Thanks, Jim. I’m stoked. thanks

(51:35):
Thank you too, man.

(51:35):
Let’s build it.

(51:36):
Let’s build some stuff.