[JOURNEY] battle buddy journal

a couple months ago I moved to Ohio to live with my brother. I wanted to start a new life. new perspectives, new friends, new everything.

When I first moved in with him.. the very first night we talked about different methods I had came up with and twisted from BHW.. and he was throwing in his input. He wasn't into IM.. yet. but he uses the internet enough to understand and grasp ideas about IM and making money online. We had a bunch of different plans and ideas to incorporate and put into motion after the very first night.

After living here for a few days and talking with him I decided to start something on the side.. where I planned on applying some IM marketing methods. My brother is a combat marine vet from the Iraq War with PTSD. I ended up launching a indiegogo campaign to raise money for a PTSD Service Dog for my brother as I realized over the first week of being here it would really benefit him and help get his mind and even life back to the here and now. So he doesn't feel like he's still living in Iraq. I had the obvious brother love thing, where I wanted to help him. but, I also knew if he was able to concentrate and get his life straight. We would make a perfect team in any of the endeavors we had talked about.

I had full intentions to start working towards one of our IM methods.. but the indiegogo campaign took off in a few different ways that made me put all of that on the back-burner and just concentrate on indiegogo. I know this is an IM forum.. so I won't get too much more into that story. You can read about it if you want on the website. I asked BigBuddy and he said it was ok if I post links as long as I'm not trying to collect emails.. I do have a popup after 7 seconds which asks you to like our facebook page. so just close that out and ignore that. I'm not asking for donations either. I'm just sharing my journey and the different methods I've used and how it's performed.. as I think it will be useful for me to look back on later, as well as twists people could apply with a different story or landing page.

You won't be able to copy exactly what I do.. because it's a different story or (landing page) that you wouldn't be able to copy.. but if you think about it differently I'm sure you can figure out some twists to go along with your own niche.

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So far we have raised $4,023. I used google adwords, facebook ads, and contacted a few bigger facebook pages that posted our indiegogo campaign for us that generated a couple 100$ donations within minutes of them making the facebook page post. Right now.. we ended up abandoning indiegogo and created our own website. I'm going to explain our adcopy for ads and the messages we sent out to facebook page owners and how they performed until it's all caught up to what we are doing now.. and I'll continue updating it's progress throughout.


So this is pretty much just an intro into the journey. I will say this though. If there is one book you can ever get your hands on to read while being in the IM game... or actually it's good for just life in general.. GO BUY "how to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie and read it now.

When we first launched indiegogo we planned to message our core people on facebook. family/friends.. so that's where we originally started and generated about $1,000 from friends and family (I'll double check and edit the exact number later.. but it was around that)

NICHE:
so our niche was veterans, or people who support vets.. possibly dog lovers.

COPY FOR EMAIL AND FACEBOOK MAIL:
We searched for facebook/twitter pages that were in the veterans niche and also a few celebs where their demographic would fall into the "give a damn about vets" category.. and started firing off messages/emails.

we ended up basically using this message for all the people we contacted just twisting it around making it more relevant or personal depending.. keeping this main focus for the messages (dale carnegie):

1. how we found them, and how I relate to what they're doing.. or why I like them.
2. build them up.
3. give them a little pitch about our story.
4. explain how they could make our story explode with a single click
5. tell them we aren't looking for donations directly from them.. just a few mouse clicks to change my brothers life

Hey Lindsey.. I stumbled across your youtube page a while back when I was searching for electronic violins after seeing jason yang.. and fell in love with you pretty much.. the music, your face and everything.

I know the odds you even reading this message are against me. but I figured I should at least try to reach out. I've launched a campaign on indiegogo for my brother a combat marine vet that has PTSD, Behcets, and other illnesses he got from the Iraq War. I know if I had you on my side to help share this story and get it out there.. my campaign would surely be 100x more successful then what I could do.

I don't want you to donate, just share it across fb/twitter if you can.

Click to expand...

I made similar messages to send to close friends and got amazing responses where they were just as motivated as we were.

We had 2 facebook pages one with over 91k likes and another with 31k post our link. the first one ended up getting marked as 'spam' and they banned the page owners regular facebook account for about a week I believe.. and our post was only shown for about 30minutes and we got 2 donations ($edit total later). The 2nd page owner posted our link for about 5minutes and we got a few more donations ($edit total later).. and removed our post because someone had contacted him about the other page owner and what happened to them. I contacted my facebook ads manager as they were the only real contact I have with facebook to get a fast response.. and she gave me an email to get that cleared up for the page owner.. it was just from facebook users clicking 'spam' and it automatically blocked the account. (I hope they fix their spam feature)

anyways. you won't be able to use my message.. but if you can find a niche where money could be made and you're passionate or at least care about it. you can craft up a similar message to start firing off to bigger people in your niche that can bring the traffic to you. Even if you end up buying facebook posts from them. Facebook works. period. as long as you target and figure out the right adcopy to use.


PPC - GOOGLE ADS / FACEBOOK ADS:

I know google just changed the method on getting adwords vouchers earlier this month and I haven't looked into it. But from what I've read so far.. I think you'll still be able to create $100 vouchers after initial 25$ investment.. so with vcc's I think technically you can test out for a smaller fee.

I used a google voucher and fb voucher I had for my PPC though. We launched our campaign on Sept 11 basically just with ads like:

What are YOU doing on 9/11?
Support a marine that was sent to Iraq because of 9/11
(edit later to exact adcopy for sept 11.)

Click to expand...

and linked to our indiegogo link.

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I'm going to edit this more later.. but I wanted to go ahead and have a thread started so I can start posting while my journey is still happening instead of at the end where I'm backtracking all my posts. I plan to start a new ppc campaign tonight that I'm optimizing. so i'll have more details about that in my next post.. and i'll start editing the previous 2 posts.

ok.. I can't edit the above post anymore...

here's the facebook ad I used for 9/11:





yesterday I created a facebook fan page for Atlas (the service dog).. to try and target a different group of people.. it's already up to 70+ likes. going to create a "vanity url" for it and add a watermark on a few photos with a link to our fanpage and contact a few different pages (german shepards, funny fb pages, military pages) to see if they'll make a post for us on their page. also might setup a few fb ads. once it gets a certain amount of likes I'll pay for a promoted post to advertise battle-buddy site so it reaches all our followers+their friends.

I have some google ads running right now.. but I didn't bid on much keywords yet. I need to optimize my landing page first. fix the "donate" buttons so it's a picture and bigger.. and change 'donate' to a better call to action. 'help change kennys life' or something similar.