Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.
But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:
What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.
It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.
I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.
I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.
Still with me? If you are, let me open up:
Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:
“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”
The “deal” was:
Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.
The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.
James’s reasoning:
1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video
2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm
3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.
The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).
You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)
I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.
So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.
I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.
The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.
Sidebar:
In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.
So what to do here?
I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.
All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.
I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.
And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.
I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.
The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.
That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).
Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:
If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.
And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.
That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.
I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?
Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.
So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.
Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.
Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.
I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.
But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.
If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works: