This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.
I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?
One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.
Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.
So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.
In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).
For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.
But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.
Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.
At first, I was confused. Then shocked.
It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.
It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.
What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.
You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.
You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.
The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.
This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.
At least for the moment.
The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.
I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.
Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.
Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.
It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.
A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.
That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.
I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.
“What everybody ought to know about…”
I tried out different angles.
Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.
Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.
Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.
And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.
In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you: