After promos, I have this habit to sit down and write up a list of conclusions.
After promos that go well, I have this habit to publicly share some of those conclusion in an email.
I just concluded my promo for for the 1-Person Advertorial Agency.
It went well.
I promoted from last Monday until last night. I sent 7 emails. I made a nice pile of money, enough to buy an F1 Savannah cat.
Here are three things I concluded/learned/want to remember from the current promo:
#1. Keep mailing as long as you’re making sales
I was 93% sure this promo would be a 98% flop for me.
I had already promoted 1PAA to my list, less than 6 months ago, when v1 became available.
I figured I had tapped out demand. I figured the mystique and excitement had gone. I figured the updated version — a nice and polished video course as opposed to a live all-evening training — actually lowered the perceived value rather than increased it.
“Should I promote this at all?” I said to myself.
I decided I would send one email on Monday and most likely be done with it. I had planned out bonuses but I purposefully didn’t even list them in the initial email, because I didn’t want to make more work for myself.
I sent that one email on Monday… and I made a couple sales.
So I decided to mail on Tuesday also.
I made more sales.
So I kept mailing, day after day after day.
Every night, I would look at my 1PAA promo like the Dread Pirate Roberts looked at Westley, and I would say to it:
“Good night, 1PAA promo. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
Well, I ended up promoting all week long, and making sales with each email I sent out. When I decided to close the promo last night, so I could move on to other things, I wrote one final farewell email, after which half a dozen more sales came in.
Lesson being, I don’t know anything, the market decides, and so I should keep mailing as long as I’m making sales.
#2. Roll your own affiliate offers
In some ways, I’ve been intimately tied to this 1PAA offer.
Last summer, Thom Benny announced this offer without making it available for affiliates.
I pushed him to open it up to affiliates because I wanted to promote it.
When Thom said he might do so in the future but cannot now, because he doesn’t have a shopping cart that accepts affiliates, I offered to run the entire offer through my ThriveCart.
Thom agreed.
The result was that we ended up selling the 30 spots of v1 of 1PAA in a matter of hours after I promoted it to my list.
When this v2 rolled around, Thom sent out a draft of his sales page.
I pushed back on what I thought was an injustice being done to the amazing case studies this offer has, which were buried deep in the body copy.
As a result, Thom pulled these case studies into the lead, and turned the dutiful v1 of the sales page into a sexy v2 of the sales page, at least to my opportunity-seeker eyes.
There’s a bigger point here:
I’ve realized I love being in a position of helping put together an affiliate offer, and promoting offers that haven’t yet become sclerotic because the offer owner really wants nothing to do with the offer any more, except to trot it out from time to time to some new affiliates, and maybe make a few more sales if those will come.
I first influenced and helped shape an affiliate offer a couple years ago, with Steve Raju’s ClientRaker.
I did it again here with 1PAA.
I will be seeking out more opportunities to partner with people and help them put together a great offer that I can then promote as an affiliate.
#3. Old promise + new plan
Marketer Justin Goff, who used to write these kinds of post-promo lessons-learned emails, which I loved and am copying now, said something profound once:
“Making money with an email list is really about selling the same benefits over and over again with a new mechanism.”
I’ve summarized this to myself as, “Old Promise + New Plan.”
I’ve realized that, when I stick to this super simple formula, offers I create or promote perform well (again, with a 98% certainty). When I stray from this formula, offers flop (with a 93% certainty).
And on that note, I can tell you that for the rest of this month, I will be talking about how you can monetize your email list, so you can buy your own F1 Savannah cat, by creating 1k+ offers that your list actually wants to buy, and that you feel good about delivering. But more about that… tomorrow.