Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - What's Working Now to Make Money in Covid - 165

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Seriously, it’s time to make your breakthrough and discover what’s working right now for making money in our current COVID reality. In this episode, you’ll discover what marketing, strategies, and mindsets high performers are currently using to produce money in 2020. Here’s what you’ll discover: 01:10 - Email marketing is extremely relevant and profitable in 2020 and is even the back bone for one of B’s multi million dollar supplement based companies. 1:33 When you desire to get good at anything new start by modeling real success in your desired industry or skill set.  6:40 Facebook marketing is still working better than ever before in 2020 and why testing big in the beginning is key.  11:58 Leadership is more necessary than any other skill set and why leadership meetings help you make more money.  15:59 Creative selling of different versions of old products and services.  18:30 Take the most advantage of upsells, cross sells and down sells and implement them across your marketing and selling processes.  The timeless benefits of joining and participating in high level, successful mastermind communities.  22:53 Discover B’s mindset and routines on how to stay strong and ensure you keep your mind and body as strong as possible. "If you want to be good at something find a company in your industry that's good and model their results." - Bedros Keuilian

If you want to be good at something, find a company that's already in your industry that's good and model. Don't copy model their results. Welcome to The Empire Show. I'm Betris Kulian, and that is Craigie Ballanty, and we are doing the old remote because of the COVID. What's working now to make money during this time of COVID-19? Let's do a deep dive into the nitty, gritty details, Craigie. Well, I'll tell you what. I have a lot of clients that are hitting record results in online coaching, in business coaching, in supplements, in accounting. One of my most successful clients is in accounting right now and he's just mopping things up.

I have real estate investors and agents that are really doing well. So I know a lot of people are sitting there and thinking and feeling like there's no way to succeed, but there is, there is. And you know, you've pivoted with a lot of your stuff and we're going to hear from that. But let's just talk about something that has worked for us, for over, Well, I think I've started email marketing in about 2000. So it's worked 20 years for me. What are you seeing in email marketing specifically with Trulene?

Because I'm on that list. And I don't know if Aaron's writing that, but somebody's doing a great job. So walk us through a little bit about how to do great email marketing. So to that point, first of all, you model success. And so if you want to be good at something, find a company that's already in your industry that's good. And model, don't copy, model their results. And so if there's a real estate agent that's really good at email marketing and they're just crushing it, get on their email list, look at their best emails, and then try and recreate your versions of it.

Study their subject lines. Why is that subject line there? Probably gets a better open rate than the goofy subject line you would come up with. And so study model success. Why are they writing in short, burst paragraphs instead of long, chunky paragraphs? Well, maybe it's easier to read. Why are they hyperlinking certain words the way they did? Maybe it gets more clicks and the clicks lead to money.

an application or whatever. And so where Truling is concerned, look, we launched Truling just over a year ago. Now it's due just over a million dollars a month in supplement sales. And all we did is we studied success. And obviously our friend Joel Marion was kind enough to give us access to his emails that he sends out. I've been on his list anyway. And so I was like, hey, Joel, I can just go through my emails and get the multiple years of emails we've been sending out. And he goes, no, man, I'll just send to you. I said, we will not copy it. We just will model it, the cadence of it, the flavor of it. And that's exactly what we did. And we're literally, as far as building the email list, we're adding about 15,000 email addresses per week to the trueling email list. And that's crazy. Yeah, one of the apps that

we use to do that is called viral sweep. We've created a viral thing with, hey, do this. You know, you could win a thing of protein or everyday fit. If you do this, do that, and then send this to two friends who opt in. And so we've been doing a lot of that. And that email list went from zero to now over 250,000 emails in no time. So viral sweep has been a big thing and doing big giveaways when people share and post about trueling supplements. And so that's been a huge thing. Where the communication is concerned, we just modeled success by modeling biotrust supplements. And we literally send out of the same cadence using a very similar type language. And guess what? It worked. And when someone starts a franchise and they're a friend or a coaching client, I'm like, look, here's the

website that we have for applications. You want to model it. Here's the cadence of emails and text messages that we send out. Here's how our call process works. So model success when given the opportunity, but anyone thinks that email marketing is dead or people aren't opening emails. Do we're still getting 25, 35% open rates on emails. And more important than that, we're having $80,000 days on emails when we send out a promotion with a code for everyday fit, for example, which is our flagship product, which is a water hydration system, right? Powder to hydrate you. Amazing. Now, I'm going to flip it totally and show you a different way of doing email that's really working. So it involves segmenting. And you know our friend Justin Goff, who's spoken in some of our

Empire Masterminds, his email list actually has an application to be on the email list. And so the email list is smaller, but he has a very, very high quality type of person on the list. And he's making millions from a list of just 2,000 or so people. He just launched a course. He's sold. He probably sold over 20% of his list has bought the course. I bought, in fact, in our company, we bought two products, two of a. with two copies of the course, one for me and one for my main copywriter. And so you might think of having an application because it might be really high-end stuff. And a lot of people are starting to do that.

We have segmented our list based on how they have responded to certain language, which allows us to run different promotions to them. So you just have to be creative and not lazy for when you want to use an email list. It absolutely still works. It is a game changer. Now, here's another thing that's worth for. To that point, you bring up a really good, good point. Someone watching this or listening to this right now, they're like, hey, I sell apparel or

supplement, so I'm going to create an application process. Do not do that. Remember what he said. Justin Goff sells expensive courses and then high-end copywriting. For example, he did some work for us. It's $100,000 to write copy and then 5 to 8% of the revenue that it generates for the next year. So when you're selling a very mega high ticket offer, you can do a application process and only take on serious people who are going to give you serious money and give you serious attention. But when you're selling a supplement for $39, $49, $59, $59,000, then you can build that list to people who are interested in losing fat, building muscle, having health, et cetera.

And so understand what is it that I'm selling and what are the hoops I'm going to make people jump through to serve them. A smaller list will be more responsive when you have a very high ticket product. And, you know, after 20 years of you and I doing this, Craigie, we kind of take it for granted. But fuck, man, we've created the science of this thing. And it still works no matter what. Absolutely. And so something else that has been working for over a decade is Facebook advertising, Facebook marketing. What are you guys doing and using and working today to grow your businesses?

So on the Trulene supplement side, we are running challenges. It's literally $29 for a 30-day challenge, right? loss challenge and of course once you're pay your $29 for that weight loss challenge you can then be exposed to all these different supplements that you want to take to get better results during the challenge and of course there's three winners who will win a trip to Hawaii and so what's really cool about that is we're running Facebook ads right now getting people to join a 30-day challenge for 29 bucks and this most recent one we just had 1500 people join our 30-day trueling challenge and all 1,500 of them are buying truing supplements to use during this challenge.

And we created a Facebook group, and they're, of course, doing the workouts and following the nutrition plans we're giving them. That's on the trueling side. On the project side, we're running videos. So those cool videos that we create that are black and white, we will run videos where we just want to get eyeballs. We'll run ads where we just want to get eyeballs on those videos

and see the copy that I wrote. And then people who watched more than 25% of those videos for the project, men specifically, will retarget and we'll say, hey, you might want to apply if you want to level up in your four F-bombs, family, faith, fitness, and finance. And so that's a $12,000 investment. So, you know, there's people paying $29 to do a 30-day challenge, people paying us $12,000 to fill out an application to then get on a call with our instructors and join one of the classes at $12,000. And so whether it's filling up a challenge or getting an application, there's so, many creative ways to use Facebook. You can do surveys. You can have them watch a video first so that you take

a cold lead and warm them up and then come and retarget to them. Or you can just take cold people and go, hey, we're doing a challenge. It's only 29 bucks. Come join and we're going to give you all these things to do it. And oh, by the way, you might want to buy Truling products while you're doing the challenge anyway because you're going to get faster, better results. And the point of this is, anyone that thinks that, well, because of the economy or COVID or it's too saturated on Facebook and it's not working out, it still is. That's the message here. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you're combining both Facebook ads and email marketing. In our business, one of the things that we've learned is, you know, we get stronger at our

Facebook marketing is the power of targeting. So we probably might target a little bit more specifically than you do, although you might think differently, but it's essentially you really need to know who your audience is. And you need to have your look-alike audiences. You need to have your retargeting. With Instagram these days, we've learned that we can target people that send us a direct message, people that have engaged in our content. All of these things, it's really allowed us to hone in and drop our ad costs down, get people, our cost per click down, and get higher conversions when we have the right audience in there. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do. I mean, obviously that platform continues to evolve and be super successful.

And then two other things that are just general points about Facebook advertising is one, you want to take big swings. Okay. If you're testing something, don't test like a different color in your headline. Test massively different messages to see if you have variation in results. And then another one is to make a lot of offers. So, you know, when we started talking, I thought you were just going to say you were running them to maybe like a trial or something. Look at all the things that you were doing. You have so many offers and you're going to see you're probably going to be surprised by one that hits really well and then shocked when another one that, oh man, I thought this one was going

to work and it doesn't. But that's the whole thing is that's why you have to be testing and tracking so many offers on Facebook, right? Yeah, that's exactly it, man. And for example, when you talk about the fact that you can now start running ads to people that have DMed you and that you've engaged. agent and DMs. And you might go, well, but that's not a lot of people. But those are some of the most targeted people. They've gone the extra effort of DMing you. And if you're, I mean, it's

really easy to get people to DM you if you offer something for free. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a great way to segment a list. And it takes people who are, look at it this way. People who follow you on Instagram, they're not all prospects. They're suspects. The people that are prospects are the people where you put a free offer. Like, I think today you put up an offer for like, hey, giving away three three of my books for a drawing, just send me a DM or whatever it was. I forgot what the call to action was. But whatever it was, the people that effectively raise their hand and take that action has said, hey, I'm not just a suspect hanging out, taking up space and watching your shit. I'm actually interested in reading your three books. And they're taking that action. And whether they

win the books or not, it doesn't matter. The fact is they've identified themselves as someone who wants more from you. Now it's up to you through ad marketing, through creative, through social engagement to get them to take a take up an offer and we forget how easy that is now through Facebook marketing absolutely now we're going to shift gears in order to be able to do all this stuff you have to be a great leader because you can't do all this stuff you can't run every Facebook ad run every challenge so what's working that's different in your leadership style and the meetings that you're doing to grow good good question so for me and my company and i i'm sure it's very different and yours. Since March 13th of 2020 here, and today we are, I think, this third day of August

2020. So since March 13th, we are having three leadership meetings a week instead of just one a week. So we have our leadership meetings three times a week instead of one a week, our L10 meetings, which means we're connected with our leadership team more. The reason for that is people's buying behavior has changed. Give you a great example. No one is that interested in. buying a fitness franchise from me right now. No one's interested in buying FitBody Boot Camp because gyms, for the most part, are not open across the country. And if they are, there's some level of open, meaning you've got to have social distancing or if you're in New Jersey, they've got to have partitions around them and cellophane and all this bullshit. So, but what if I'm like, hey, look,

if you're, if you've been following me and show an interest in FitBody Boot Camp, we're given a $10,000 equipment credit. If you sign up this summer, become a franchisee, and we're going to negotiate for you with your prospective landlord and see if we can get you four to six months of free rent because there's so many businesses going out of business that landlords want to give away several months of free rent will negotiate that for you and will give you $10,000 equipment credit. I'd rather give a $10,000 basic discount on a franchise today this summer and keep selling franchises so that my salespeople are still in momentum than to go, well, I'm just not going to franchises and because no one's buying gyms. And so what other ways of creative can you get? But the only

way we were able to do that is to have these leadership meetings and to go, all right, guys, let's, if anything is possible, what can we do? And someone's like, can we give a discount? Well, as a franchise, you can't necessarily give a discount because if you do, you got to go back and give everyone else a discount. But we can give a $10,000 equipment credit. So you pay us to $50,000 buying fee like you normally would. When you're buying your equipment, we'll give you $10,000 back to buy your equipment with is basically the discount. Those meetings are what transpired into how we're going to sell truleen, how we're going to sell the franchise in a different way,

how we created the wellness shots right here, and we're now blowing these things on Amazon because I was like, guys, let's do a think tank. We brought our entire team in. Like we normally do leadership meetings with just the leaders. We brought our team in on a Friday because they're all working from home because of the COVID. We're like, all right, think tank. What new product can we create?

We've got a franchise. We've got a supplement company. We've got a coaching business. What new product can we create under any one of those umbrellas? Someone raised their hand and goes, well, I know people are worried about their immune system and everyone's wearing the masks so their immune systems are going down. And what if we had a really cool wellness shot that didn't have the sugars that you complain about B and all that?

Because I just rant and rave throughout the building about how all these like emergency packets are all bullshit, right? I'm like, great, let's create it. And I thought we were going to sell it on trulean.com like everything else. They go, hey, you know, the third larger search engine is Amazon. I'm like, it is? Like, yeah, Google, YouTube, then Amazon. I'm like, holy crap.

I went to Amazon and started writing Trueline, and you could tell people were searching Trueline, right? All the different products that we have. Oh, my God. We launched this on Amazon first, and it blew up, and now we're gaining traffic for FitBody Boot Camp. The people that are buying this are getting offers to work out at their local FitBody Boot Camp because it's basically the same company, Truline and Fit Body Boot Camp.

Again, I not had more meetings and tapped into the think tank of even the lowest level employee here who's brand new, we wouldn't have had an amazing product sold on Amazon that's getting us more money and leads? Absolutely amazing, my man. Now, you have a lot of creative selling of different versions of old products and services too. Like you had a new way of getting coaching clients by doing the short coaching challenge and then you upsold people into your highest level of coaching. which I thought was brilliant. So if you wanted to walk us through that again, great.

Yeah, so the COVID hits. It's like mid-March. By end of March, I'm like, holy crap, we're not getting any applications in from my $55,000 private coaching program. What do I do? I'm like, I got an idea. What if I go, I'm doing the seven-day income ignition for seven days, I'll train you live.

Two hours a day for seven days. I need 50 people to pay me $1,000 for the seven days. 50 people to pay me $1,000 per person. So we got the 50 people. because just because they can't afford $55,000 for the year, because they're worried about the COVID and the economy and they're trying to save their money, they still want coaching for me. And what would Baderos do during this time? So I'll pay $1,000 to sit with 50 other people on Zoom with Baderos for seven days. I demonstrated so much value and proof. And here's all I did. I gave everybody their marching orders on day one. I said, you got to call 20 of your previous clients and customers who have bought from you and get at least 10% of them. So two of them to come in and spend money. with you again by tomorrow. So that was on a Monday by Tuesday. Well, when you only have 24 hours, you just do it. So literally on Tuesday, we start the next, that day with what were your wins? And everyone starts, well, I got three people in. I got four people in. I only got one.

Well, one's okay too. All right. Now the next day I teach, tell them what they're going to do, what text message, what selfie videos they're going to make and send out to prospects who have shown interest but haven't bought. And you're going to convert so many of these people the next day they do that. I demonstrated proof in what I can produce for them so quickly in seven days. On day six, I said, guys, tomorrow's day seven. We're running out of time. You guys, so many of you already made a couple thousand, a few thousand, nine thousand dollars in seven days from money that you didn't even know existed. If you think that you want to work with me, reach out to Joan and set up a one-on-one call, let's see if we're going to be a good fit.

I got nine people to pay me $55,000 to work with me one-on-one, dude. It was bananas out of that same group of people who I know would never have done that on the first day. I mean, that is just a game changer because you conjured money out of thin air. And that's what I absolutely love about you is you're always finding a way. Okay. It's like it's being resourceful when you don't have the resources. Now, what about doing, especially with truly, now that you have multiple supplements, what are you guys doing for up cells and cross cells and down cells in your funnels,

or what has simply worked even with fit body challenges and stuff like that? What are some things that has worked and will work now? So where the fit body challenges are concerned, we did the 28 days stronger together challenge, meaning, hey, we all got to get stronger together. We're trapped at home. You can't work out of the gym. so 28 Days Stronger Together Challenge, 28 days for 28 bucks, Craigie.

And that ended up where after the first 28 days, you just pay $98 a month and you continue doing the online coaching with us until your local Fit Body Boot Camp opens up. And so people who think, well, now I can't run a challenge because my gym's not open. I'm here to tell you 28 days for 28 bucks. That's not a lot of money.

But if you treat these people well for those 28 days that they're on board during that challenge, we had 25% convert into $98 a month for online coaching. It's all about demonstration of proof. The same thing that I did by charging 50 people, $1,000 each, and coached them up for seven days and demonstrated proof and converted nine of them into $55,000 apiece coaching clients. We did the same thing with the 28 days for $28.

Where the upsells are concerned for Trulene, I don't know what best supplement upsells exist. I said, guys, let's go through as many supplement company sales funnels as possible. So we spent several thousand dollars going through as many upsells as possible through different supplement companies. Some were horrible. Some look pretty decent and compelling. We took screenshots and then we started to model success.

Like in areas where I can't get creative because it's not in my zone of genius because supplement companies are new to me, I just model success. Where coaching is concerned and gyms are concerned, that's my bread and butter. I've been doing it for 20 years. I got this. I could just recreate the wheel in a different way. And so we modeled success. We found what works. We don't come out the gate selling protein. We come out the gate selling hydration powder because our clientele is mostly women, 67% are chronically dehydrated. So we sell everyday fit, which is our hydration formula, and then upsell them into protein right after that. And we thought that was going to be the winner. Turns out, after hydration formula, they want more hydration formula. So instead of one, how about three? And then we plugged in the protein for the second upsell, revenue went up. So you model success and then you start tweaking as you go. Yeah, which leads me to the next one, which is what's working and what's always worked is masterminded, connecting with other like-minded entrepreneurs.

Like you start a supplement company, so you masterminded with Joel, Marion, one of the world's best at starting supplement companies. I mastermind with other coaches like Zander Fryer, Vince Domonti. Justin Goff, guys who are running masterminds, because that's what we do in our business. We learn coaching programs. And even if you can't physically in-person mastermind with somebody, it's that network. So when you wanted to do the Amazon thing,

you reached out and said, I need help selling on Amazon. We went to our network and we found Ryan Moran, who's got a great book, by the way, 12 months to $1 million is a great book, really good book. And, you know, he had us speak at his capitalism conference. I was like, man, you got to go to Ryan Moran because he sold a lot of stuff on Amazon.

He pumped you up and gave you all the stuff that you needed. And you're running these coaching masterminds. And one of the cool things about what you did there with the 20 lead follow-up is anybody who is in there, when you were given that advice, you didn't want to show up the next day and let the other people in the group see that you were weak, right? Like there was some accountability there. And I knew that pressure, which was positive pressure, was good for them. because otherwise they're going to sit on dissatisfaction, as Jason Redmond calls, is sitting on the X of disaster.

It's like, hey, now you have something productive to do. You're going to call 20 people because tomorrow at 2 p.m., we're going to go out live again on Zoom. And like you said, you don't want to be the person that let everybody else down and didn't do your part. Absolutely. So keeping your mind right in masterminds is so important. And then keeping your body right is also super important. And you just talk about your supplement schedule. So you've shared it on other shows, but talk about the power of your immunity shot and your morning nutrition and how that keeps you right so that you can be a high performer all day long and not get sluggish.

Yeah, you know, because remember, this whole episode is about making more money during this time of COVID. So make no mistake about it. As summer goes on and we go towards the fall and now it's the flu season, the cold season. People don't know if it's a flu, the cold or the COVID. They're going to freak out. And if you're an entrepreneur, you want to make more money, and at some point, this thing's going to all blow over. You're going to travel? Like, whenever I traveled, I rarely got sick.

The reason for that was I always made sure that I'm up on my supplements, the supplements that are going to do good for my immune system. And so I've always been a big fan of taking those emergency packets, and then on top of that, take an extra echinacea and ginseng and ginger and termech. But I realized there was really nothing out there that was like an all in one. And even those things had sugar in the packets, even a little bit of sugar. And sugar competes for the same receptor sites that vitamin C does. And so if there's 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C in a product and sugar, you're not going to absorb all that vitamin C, which is not going to work in your favor. So I was like, I'm going to create something. And that's where that wellness shot came from, as we talked about.

But more importantly, throughout the day, I figure if I can optimize my health, I'm going to think better, be less foggy. not get sick. And while that's not a marketing system, if I'm not in bed and I'm in front of my computer or on stage speaking, that's where I make money. And so it just makes sense that I drink 30 ounces of water, that I have these wellness shots, you know, twice a day, that I focus on keeping my sugar low because we know that sugar is one, addictive, two, puts you in the sweet cycle, sweet salty cycle, which you don't want. And you're going to start eating a whole bunch of...

Well, wait, wait, man, hold on. That sounds interesting. Tell me more about the sweet salt. The sweet salty cycle. That is a... Is it that like you eat some sweets and then you want some salty stuff? Yeah. You eat some salty stuff and you want some sweet stuff. That's exactly it.

I never heard that before. Are you serious? Yeah. Oh yeah, dude. It's like there's some study done on that that if you eat something sweet, you want something salty. And the wacky thing... That's why you want soda and chips. That's exactly it.

And so when we do that, or pizza and a soda, like all that stuff. And so when you do that, think about it. Most things that are salty are bad for you. Most things that are sweet are bad for you. And so you're really ingesting two bad things over and over again in a cycle until you go to bed and the cycle breaks. And so why do that, especially if you're going to get an insulin spike from all the sugar and be foggy headed and then go for your midday caffeine and Starbucks run? Like now I'm seeing at Starbucks, they're like that second helping of the day at two o'clock or whatever, the ads that they're running on their store windows. They know that you're going to get that extra creamy whipped cream, whipped cream, sugary drink, and then it's going to create a spike.

and then the dump, and then you're going to go back for more. And so if you can keep your body optimized through hydration, through nutrition, through better sleep, through stress management, through workout, all of those things matter in making more money. Because when Craig is doing this, he's making money. If Craig's like, hey, B, I can't film these four podcasts that we're just doing all at once today because I'm a little under the weather, well, shit, you're not going to make money. And so it just makes sense that you optimize your health and mind to make more money.

Yeah, absolutely. I tell my clients to treat yourself like a professional athlete because at the end of the day, that's what you are. You're a professional athlete in the world of being an entrepreneur and you got to take your hydration seriously. You got to take your rest and recovery period seriously. You can't sit there and take four hours where the phone calls back to back and not get up and not go pee and not drink water because you're stuck to your chair. You can't go and get any fluids. You got to treat yourself just like a pro athlete treats themselves. Yeah, you've got to have hard training. and high performance, but you've got to have recovery too. Exactly. And so where the COVID is concerned that anyone thinks that has this belief system that I will start making money once the COVID's over, don't start making more money now. We gave you the strategy for email marketing, Facebook marketing, building your leadership skills up even more, where you might need to have more leadership meetings and you might need to talk and give power to more of your team members who have great ideas that you just haven't tapped into. We talked about creative selling and different versions of old products and services,

breathing new life into those products and services. We talk about upsells, cross-sails, and down-cells. Like, someone's buying something from you. They're going to buy something else if you can make another offer. Do that offer. Masterminding and surrounding yourself with people who already are where you want to be, are doing what you want to do, learn from them. And finally, keep your body and your mind right because you are an athlete in the sport of

entrepreneurship. And so to that point, anything else to add, Craigie? I'll tell you what. You can't wait until it's over because, If some of these powers have their way, it'll never be over. So you've got to go and chart your own course. And as you love to say about what I said once, control what you can and concentrate on what counts. Amen.

Well said. All right, guys and gals, thanks for watching and listening to this episode of The Empire Show. As always, take a screenshot, share it on social media, tag myself and Craig on it. And, of course, five-star reviews. We would really, really appreciate it. And as always, don't forget to tell your mama. Hell, tag your mama on it as well.