[JOURNEY] IM Ball Busting Breeze To Break Even

[Vulgar]

Hi, I'm Vulgar and I'm based in the UK.

I'll keep the introduction brief and simple.

I should know enough about internet marketing to at least break even in this. Or perhaps I’m a self-made millionaire who’s made his fortune being an affiliate? I’ll let you decide and perhaps I reveal at one point in this [Journey] what’s what.

Let's see if that's the case.

But more than that, I want to share the knowledge I’ve been gathering on the subject since 2009.

So, what's the goal here?

It's simple.

THE GOAL: Break even by the end of the year (December 31st, 2019)

The start date is November the 1st (I honestly don't know why I'm trying to accommodate the American audience with my date formatting here).

Think about it this way.

If I was able to break even, then by simple logic, it should take just a few tweaks here and there to start generating profit.

That's why the goal here is to break even.

Just.

To start with.

At least for now - don’t panic.

Everyone starts with big numbers, and they get disappointed soon enough.

So, what’s the plan you ask?

THE PLAN: Create a website & Facebook page, sprinkle some advertising magic and make shitloads of money through ClickBank

Sounds simple enough.

Before we go further afield, I wanna show you that it's 100% possible to outsource everything and still be able to at least break even.

For example, I know how to make a wicked site in WordPress myself, but I'm outsourcing it to Fiverr.

You could be very good at making amazing sites in WP as well, but how about if you start valuing your time a bit better now, huh?

Instead of doing it yourself, you could focus on more pressing issues aka income-generating tasks (IGT). More about this later.

Here's a pro tip.

THE PRO TIP: Create your power team

What is a power team?

A power team is a group of people that you outsource the work to.

For example, in order to break even in an IM model that we’re going to employ in this [Journey], you need to have these three basic building blocks put in place:

• Website
  
  
• Content
  
  
• Sales funnel

The website

So, if you value your time more rather than wasting it on laborious efforts to save a few bucks and develop your site yourself, you will naturally put a person in place to do it for you.

It shouldn’t cost you more than $40 to $50 to pay someone to do it for you.

The content

You need content, otherwise, you won’t be able to sell anything.

There are two ways of making content:

Number 1 - you write it yourself or hire somebody who’s got experience in your niche, or;

Number 2 - you go to your competitors, copy/paste the most engageable articles they have to offer into one article, and outsource it to a Fiverr editor who’s going to rewrite the whole thing to pass the Copyscape

Sales funnel

This is something we will tackle when we get there. At the moment, we’re still at the stage of setting it all up.

But you do get where I’m going with this.

You could easily employ your skills in the money-making tasks rather than the laborious ones by having a team in place.

Who else are you going to need?

By the time we’ll have explored the sales funnel, you will need a couple of those:

So what’s the actual strategy?

It’s simple.

I will create a series of articles on the product I’ll be offering, point Facebook ads to these articles to create a buzz, collect emails in the meantime, market some products via email and make the bucks to break even.

What’s the niche?

That’s not a secret - it’s a diet niche.

One thing you need to be aware of - there are three organic giants:

• Health & wellbeing
  
  
• Money
  
  
• Sex
  

The diet sector happens to fall under the health and wellbeing category. It would be wise to narrow it down a little bit, but for now, I will keep it broad on purpose. Stay tuned why.

Expenditure so far:

-£109.73

Find out what that money went on in the next post.

That’s all for now.

Are you still with me? Let me know if this is something that you might be following.

 

[diibrour]

Thread watched !!

 

[maxendio]

Watching this for sure

 

[Naijalife]

Great journey I do hope you break even wish you all the best

 

[Seven4]

Wishing you much luck and success. Good luck.

 

[HiPurple]

You have a spectacular command of writing. Well played.

(I gave up on all traditional date formatting and just go with 2019-11-01).

 

[Vulgar]

You have a spectacular command of writing. Well played.

(I gave up on all traditional date formatting and just go with 2019-11-01).

Thanks, buddy. Glad you're enjoying it.

Thread watched !!

Thanks mate!

Watching this for sure

Thank you!

Great journey I do hope you break even wish you all the best

Thanks mate!

Wishing you much luck and success. Good luck.

Thanks!

 

[grnugroho]

Good luck on your journey.

 

[unsungwarrior]

Following, good luck with your journey

 

[TheVigilante]

Yes I am with you and will follow along

 

[Rojuhh]

Love your writing style . good luck !!

 

[Vulgar]

UPDATE #2

I hope you've had a nice weekend!

I spent mine mostly delegating and outsourcing stuff, so I could focus on more important tasks such as:

• Overall strategy
  
  
• Drawing up various sale funnels on a whiteboard (I’ll post some pics of the actual whiteboard in the next post when we talk about the funnels)
  
  
• Reading a couple of books
  
  
• Taking care of my other businesses
  
  
• Writing this post

There are 4 different ways you can manage your time, especially when it comes to IM, but it also applies to any other area of life and business as well:

1. You can waste it
   
   
2. You can spend it
   
   
3. You can invest it
   
   
4. You can create it

TIME WASTED

Everyone is a master at wasting their time; it’s baby-easy to do.

The only people who can afford to waste time are the ones who have recurring passive income coming in which is greater than their living expenses.

Otherwise, they’re eroding time and life.

TIME SPENT

You can spend your time wisely or foolishly.

Working on laborious tasks that generate little-to-no income is time spent foolishly because it keeps you busy and prevents you from doing what you should be actually doing to maximize your potential.

TIME INVESTED

This is everything you do to better yourself in terms of future value.

For example, you invest your time in reading a technical book; or you’re watching YouTube to acquire a new skill, etc.

TIME CREATED

This is where shit hits the fan.

The idea of hard work is a fallacy.

You DO NOT need to work harder to make it - unless you’re trying to compete in sports.

Work smarter instead. And I’ll show you how to do it.

How does one create more time?

It’s simple - by delegating and outsourcing stuff, you create more time for yourself.

Obviously, if you’re skint and have no money to pay for freelancers, you will have to do it yourself and that’s the only time you should be working hard(er).

But you have no excuse if there’s some money sitting in your bank. Don’t worry - it will all make sense to you in a minute.

How do you determine what to delegate and what not to delegate?

WHAT TO DELEGATE & WHAT NOT TO DELEGATE

It couldn’t be easier - buy yourself a crystal ball!

Rather than trying to predict what to delegate and what not to delegate, we’re going to use the maths to calculate your income generating value (IGV).

Figure out your average weekly income and how much time you spend on generating this income (both your actual employment & time spent on working on your business).

Formula:

Income / weekly hours = IGV

Example:

$1,000 / 50 hours per week = $20 per hour

How to use it

Every task performed by you that will bring in more than $20 per hour of value it’s ok to do yourself without eroding your IGV.

By contrast, everything that brings in less than $20 per hour, you should delegate and outsource it to somebody.

It’s important to understand that the power of compounding works for this as well. When you free up time from lower-value tasks for higher-value tasks, you bring in more money by default which increases your overall IGV.

See the real-life example below where I’ve outsourced making the WP site to somebody on Fiverr.

THE WEBSITE

The website just got delivered on Fiverr.

And I must admit, it's amazing how much stuff you can get for £34.07

(it would have taken me about 5 hours to come up with a good looking and functional site built in WP which means if my IGV is $20 per hour I would have invested $100 of my own time instead of outsourcing it for $40).

It took about a day, but he's delivered exactly as I requested.

If you're thinking of hiring a freelancer to do it for you, here's a good method to keep things simple:

• create a shareable google doc
  
  
• include everything in there, ie. site title, tagline, site icon, theme color, main menu, footer menu, social icon links, etc.
  
  
• and of course content & images for each page

It's a good idea to keep everything within one document as you can update it as you go, and more than one person can work on it simultaneously - this will help when you get yourself more than one freelancer to work on the same project.

THE CONTENT

I've got a couple of freelancers that are great at rewriting content.

At the moment, one of them is working on an article I found on Medium.

The article is just under 4000 words and received more than 10k claps which confirms it's something people want and appreciate it.

The idea here is to rewrite this article to make it unique and repackage the whole thing into a downloadable PDF to be offered to the visitors in exchange for their email address.

This will be the very top of our first sales funnel.

Is it cheating?

I don’t think so.

The site won’t get flagged for duplicate content and nor will the two pieces of content look identical.

Is it less work-intensive?

Sure it is. And that’s the point!

Especially at the start, you don’t want to be experimenting with ideas for an article that might or might not work. Unless you have the budget and want to hire an expert and use them to write your article for several hundred bucks then go ahead.

But then again, until it’s live and put to the test, you have absolutely no scobbie if it’s successful so why would you risk that amount of cash.

Instead of pondering on which route to go, make sure you give your audience good value by rewriting a good piece of content.

MOVING FORWARD

What’s done so far:

✔ Website (outsourced)

✔ Facebook page (outsourced)

✔ Instagram profile (outsourced)

✔ Twitter profile (outsourced)

✔ MailChimp integration (outsourced)

X PDF content (outsourced but still in progress - deadline Nov 8th)

X Bing ads

X Google ads

NEXT POST

In the very next post, we will be discussing the advertising strategy, email marketing & funnels.

• Create ads on FB/Bing/Google and point people to the PDF

• Collect emails

• Create two other sale funnels

• Recap the expenditure

THE EXPENDITURE

So that’s the expenditure thus far.

Let’s go through it one by one:

Wordpress Dev - £34.07 as mentioned earlier, that’s for the website made on Fiverr

Article - £38.55 this is how much it costs to rewrite a 4000-word article by a copywriter specializing in the rewrites

Managed WP GoDaddy - that’s for hosting the site (monthly recurring cost)

Domain - that’s the domain one-off purchase (renews annually)

Ads - spent £25 so far on Facebook page likes for social proof

Btw, I use Spendee on IOS to track my expenses for every project.

SOCIAL PROOF

Social proof is important as it helps to convert the visitors into paying customers.

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer who ends up on a Facebook page with 20 likes - it would be extremely hard for you to pull the trigger and buy anything really.

That’s why it’s important to spend a few bucks on the likes.

Now, as always, there are several different routes you can opt-in for when going for the page likes on Facebook:

• Get cheap likes from India (about £0.01 per like). Here you can get about 100-200 likes and turn the page like campaign off

Or

• Start targeting your audience right from the start (about £0.25 per like)

I personally get some cheap likes for my new FB page and turn it off as soon as I hit about 100 of them and then switch to the targeted audience.

It won’t matter one bit that you have several hundred Indian page likes when you’re retargeting whoever engaged with your page on facebook later on as you can always filter out the countries you don’t want to retarget or create a lookalike audience of.

But it sure as hell helps with the social proof to get some page like traction going right from the start, so do not ignore this step.

FINAL WORDS

Make sure you understand the importance of outsourcing certain work which might be holding you back and track everything you do.

Otherwise, you won’t see the progress and your weak points, and more than that, the whole thing might overwhelm you at one point.

Till next time!

 

[Vulgar]

Good luck on your journey.

Thanks very much

Following, good luck with your journey

Nice one, thank you

Yes I am with you and will follow along

I appreciate it mate

Love your writing style . good luck !!

Thanks for your kind words!

 

[Vulgar]

Hey everyone!

It's been a while since I posted last and that's because I was on holidays in Rio de Janeiro for two weeks.

I'm now back and should be full steam ahead with the plan.

This is what the first basic funnel will look like:

1. Facebook Ad

- controversy / conflict headline -> pattern interrupt image -> copy: pain 1, pain 2, breakthrough, solution, pleasure, please, call to action

2. CTA

- email sign-up for a free pdf

3. Mailchimp

- autoresponder -> email1 = value -> email2 = value -> email3 = value -> email 4 = affiliate product

I will be creating more advanced funnels with retargeting shortly after the launch of this one.

In the meantime, I didn't bum around in Brazil. I created several social media profiles on FB, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok and promoted them accordingly in terms of the followers.

The plan is to build a decent following and utilise it to boost the email signups.

So far, Twitter is winning with the most followers as I managed to get just over 100 of them in a couple of days by tweeting some small value.

Next update soon once the first funnel is up and running.

 

[Vulgar]

Hi guys,

Apologies for not updating this thread in a while. I was way too busy with building funnels for my clients.

But also, I've created three diet products in the meantime.

Well, sort of.

It's very simple, the entry product is $7 which is a short book on the best Keto practices.

The second product is a $37 custom diet plan which I outsource to the experts to write for my client - they charge me $5 to write it per client.

And the third product is a $97 upsell which is personal diet coaching and accountability for 3 months - the expert from product number 2 is doing the coaching on an off chance the client will stay with her for longer than 3 months. If they do, they make the money but I've already bagged my share.

It took a bit of negotiation, but I got there in the end.

I'm in the middle of actually creating my own digital products so I don't have to rely on anybody.

Because it's working now, it doesn't mean it will forever and the diet coach can change her mind any day so I better prepare for it beforehand.

So, let's geek out on some of the figures to date:

As of today, Twitter sits at nearly 700 followers and drives a bit of traffic form it:

I've also launched a Facebook ad campaign a couple of weeks ago and it's going ok so far. Trying to get the CPC down at the moment so fingers crossed it goes below £0.30 in the next few days:

And here's the click funnels result for the actual optin page:

It's not bad, but it's not great either. I've had much better results after spending the first £100. It's workable though.

Let's take a look at how this translates into figures in Stripe:

So we've grossed £1064.05 in the past month from which $115 goes to the coach for the plan, £138 goes toward the FB ads, $97 toward click funnels subscription and $16.50 toward MailChimp.

Net profit is about £749 so we're waaay in the green for the first month of real work.

Next step is to perfect the copy within the funnel, start Reddit ads since Reddit seems to be huge on diet, create a split test ad on FB and introduce an affiliate product from click bank as an OTO (one time offer only) for the downsell at the end of the funnel.

The actual funnel structure looks like this at the moment:

Step 1 in the funnel: Opt-in page lead magnet

It's a quiz where people answer a number of questions about their lifestyle and eating habits. In return, they find out how the keto diet will benefit them IF they fill out the optin form with their email address.

Once they fill it out, they get onto my list and they're sent the quiz results.

THIS IS IMPORTANT HERE

As soon as they fill out the form, they're redirected to the SECOND step of the funnel where they can start buying the products!

A lot of people play hide and seek with their traffic. You NEED to qualify them as buyers as soon as possible and this is the best way to do it.

Step 2 in the funnel: Sales page

This is where they are introduced to the $7 offer as soon as they sign up.

This is also the page that is sent to them in the first email from the autoresponder in case they click out. It's sort of a prehistoric retargeting technique if you like.

Step 3 in the funnel: Upsell page

This is where they get upsold the $37 custom diet plan written by the expert. It's a fairy long page with testimonials.

Also, it's the 2nd email in the sequence.

Step 4 in the funnel: Upsell page #2

This is where they're showered with absolute value and coaching for $97 as a one time offer only for 3 months.

3rd email in the autoresponder.

Step 5 in the funnel: Thank you page

This is where I want to squeeze in an affiliate offer. At the moment it's just a simple TY page, but it doesn't introduce anything open-ended so I'm not making any money on this one here.

4th email in the Mailchimp sends a coupon with a discount to those who haven't clicked any links in the emails yet and to those who clicked but didn't buy.

The discount is 25% on everything and guess what. Nobody used it as of yet. Everyone who bought paid the full whack.

Just make sure THIS email doesn't get sent to those who already purchased - make the best use of your tags in MC or whatever you're using for emails to avoid that.

The email sequence carries on providing general knowledge on keto diet ONCE a week, but I've only written 8 emails so I'm about to run out of emails soon and this needs to go to the top of my list of tasks to do.

And just so you know, the first 4 emails are sent every day. I find for myself and my clients that an email sent every 24 hours work the best, especially when you write your emails as open-ended stories where your audience is looking forward to receiving the next email because you promised to deliver something special to them in it.

Okay, that's it from me for now and I will be in touch in a couple of weeks' time.

 

[Ice Geek]

Good luck journey!!!

 

[Stop]

wow already in green numbers, congrats!
How long did it take you to learn all this?

 

[Vulgar]

Good luck journey!!!

Thanks.

wow already in green numbers, congrats!
How long did it take you to learn all this?

Thanks. I've been building funnels since 2015 so about 5 years give or take.

 

[Guts N Glory]

Damn, That was quick. I'm following this... I love how you go deep into your process telling us what you actually did

Quick question to you Which skill would you recommend any newbie to learn in 2020 to have a good shot at success in this online world

 

[vivalafeva]

this is great man!

What are your clients like? Do you take freelance work for writing direct response copy for funnels? Lets chat