Episode #051: The Guru's Champagne Promises with Beer Budget Students
The Guru's Champagne Promises with Beer Budget Students
This episode is a little bit different - there isn't necessarily some tactical advice, or a "training" on how to run ads - but rather it's a conversations about the industry at large that I think it's important that we have!
In this episode I talk about how...
We easily get caught up comparing ourselves to things and experiences that we should
How I've felt SHAME around my success, because of the way our industry covets the 7-figure market
The reality of running a business online - even if it's not the popular marketing message we're used to hearing
This is a real, honest, transparent episode - and I hope you like it. And if you do, can you do me a favor and DM me over on Instagram and let me know - I'd love to here your honest feedback!
Links Mentioned:
Zach's 2023 Drawing Skills (Referenced on Podcast)
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast Episode #51, and in this episode we're talking about champagne taste with a beer budget. Let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not-so-average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Now, I'm going to be careful not to blow your eardrums out because I am really fired up. I just got off a call with my coach a little while ago and it really got the gears in my head turning, because there's a lot happening in our industry, not just right now but all the time, that I think sometimes we don't talk about. And this show is all about marketing differently, and marketing in ways that feel good, and marketing in ways that are honest and connected and make us feel good about the products and services that we're offering to our audience.
And so I was talking to my coach and we were talking about our upcoming bootcamp, and if you haven't heard about our bootcamp, we're offering a five-day Facebook Ads Bootcamp. You can check it out over at heartsoulhustle.com/bootcamp, where we're basically teaching you how to grow your email list with Facebook ads. And there was a couple ads that came across my feed recently that were talking about, "Add 1,000 people to your email list in a week," or, "Add 1,000 people to your audience in just X amount of days." And for our bootcamp, we're telling people, look, if you spend 150 to 200 bucks, you can get around 100 leads on your email list. And we started talking about this and I said, "The thing is, it's like influencers and gurus are making champagne promises to people with beer budgets."
And it really got me thinking that I wanted to do a podcast episode on it and talk to you a little bit about how we need to think differently about our marketing. And I will be fully transparent, this is an episode that's going to be a little more esoteric, cerebral, mental. There's not going to be like, "Click this button in Facebook ads to gut this result." This episode, I want to talk about the industry and the things that we're seeing and how we need to think differently. I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus. I'm not going to be like, "This specific person is doing bad things." I'm not doing any of that. I just want to talk about some of the things that we see as a whole.
There was an ad that came across my desk that was like, "Add 1,000 people to your list in a week." And there was also this comment on it that was like, "I used this and I added 4,000 people to my email list in just a couple of days with advertising." And it really got me thinking, it's like to the average person reading that, it's like, "That's what I want. I want a big email list. I want to add 1,000 people to my email list a week. I want to reach the masses, I want to blow up my audience." But the reality is, let's just be super optimistic, let's say this person who added 4,000 leads in 48 hours was spending 25 cents a lead. That means they spent $1,000 in 48 hours. Now, realistically, those leads tend to cost $1+ is what we tend to see with Facebook, and that means it's probably like a $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 spend.
And let me ask you this question, just to kind of think on it. How many of us who are listening to this podcast are ready to blow $4,000 in 48 hours? Now, I know a little bit about my audience. I know where they tend to be at in business and in their growth plans, and y'all are not ready to spend $4,000 in two days. And that's not a jab, that's not a barb. That's not, "Oh my gosh, you should be able to do that." That's simply an observation. Most people in the online marketing space are not able to spend that kind of money, and yet the influencers and the gurus are saying, "Oh, look at how much you can grow your audience. Look at the massive results you can get," and then they highlight these case studies of the unicorn.
And so one of the things that we made sure to do when we launched our bootcamp offer is we actually littered the page with testimonials, and I kind of was like, well, should we do that? Because I don't want people to be like, "This is so aspiring, this is so incredible. I want that result to." And so we did two big things. One, we only put testimonials on the page of people who had gone through the bootcamp or used the exact strategy we teach in the bootcamp, because we actually, before we had this bootcamp, we taught this a month in our membership, and so we had some membership testimonials as well, but they were using the same strategy we teach in this bootcamp.
What we found, and what... What I found when I did this, I'm just going to say it, is that there was consistency in our testimonials. We have one person who said, "I got leads for 50 to 60 cents." One person who said $1 to $1.50, another person who said 68 cents, 82 cents, $1, $1.50. Everybody was kind of in this 50 cent to $2 range, and what I realized is that the reason I felt okay with it, the reason I was like, "You know what? I do want a ton of these testimonials," is because the results are the results that normal people are getting with a decent Facebook ads budget. And when I say decent, I'm talking like $200 the week of the bootcamp and then $5 to $10 a day thereafter.
Why aren't we talking about this more, that we see people highlight, "Oh my gosh, this person took my course and they launched their training and they made a million dollars in 38 hours," but we don't talk about how they already had a big list, or we don't talk about how they already had an audience, we don't talk about how they're an influencer on Instagram already. We just hear, "Bob used my process in three days to make a billion dollars." And I really think that that has to change, and so if you're listening to this and you're kind of saying, "Well, where does that change start?" Well, in my opinion, that change starts with us. That change starts with us saying we're not going to market that way. We're not going to market in a way that leads people to believe they're going to get these incredible results when they don't have the means to do it.
So, full transparency, I'm going to share some numbers with you, from early November to the air date of this, we've added about 5,000 people to our email list. Or rather, I should say we've had 5,000 people opt in to our freebie, because frankly, some people are already on our email list. We didn't see 100% growth from every single opt-in that came from Facebook. Sometimes, somebody's already on your list. But we had over 5,000 people opt in to our 2023 planner. We spent $6,300 over that period of time. We spent $6,300 for about 5,000 leads, which breaks down to about $1.25 to $1.30 per lead.
I have worked my butt off in my business for nearly 10 years. I started in February of 2015, is when we officially incorporated, and I had been running it for about six months before that, I'm sorry, February of 2015. I want to make sure I'm fully honest and transparent here. So, I've been doing this for almost 10 years, and running ads I was doing for a year and a half before I started. So I'm talking about running ads for nearly 10 years. I have busted my butt and I've worked hard to create cash reserves, to create recurring revenue, to create programs and offers and income. This is not something that I could have done eight years ago when I was getting started. And that's what we need to be talking about. We need to be having this conversation.
We need to be having more transparency, and it really brings to mind, if you didn't already see, we'll link it up in the show notes, but I wrote a breakdown of my $485,000 year. And can I tell you, can we be real with each other for a second? I hope that's okay. When I wrote this, I was actually kind of feeling bad. And the reason I was feeling bad is I was like, "Man, I've been doing this for, this'll be our eighth or ninth year and we haven't broke a million dollars, and people are going to judge and people are going to say things, and people are going to wish that we had done more or kind of expect that we had done more to get results, and, and, and..."
But the reality is, y'all, $485,000 a year with a small team of three people is nothing to shake a stick at. And yet because of the way that this industry has warped, frankly, the way that we think and perceive success, I felt bad about sharing an incredible achievement because I thought other people are going to say, "Well, I'd rather work with someone who makes a million dollars." And if you're listening to this and that is your truth, don't DM me. Don't tell me. I don't want to know. But in my mind, we got incredible feedback from that article. We posted that, and generally we get no comments when we publish a podcast or a blog. So, side note, you are always welcome to leave a comment on our blogs and on our articles on our website, but we got lots of comments on this guy. I mean, it's all subjective, but we ended up with 15, 20 people commenting compared to we generally get zero.
And what I really was just mind-blown by is people were like, "Thank you for inspiring me." "Thank you for staying strong." "Thank you for inspiring me." "Thank you for taking me behind the scenes." "Thank you for this post." "Thank you for sharing the reality." "I'm so excited by your success, thank you for showing me it's possible." And yet, before I hit publish on that, the thoughts were swirling in my head about how people were going to say, "This should be better." And I think that's a problem.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and say my money crap is the industry's money crap. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is think about how this industry warps the way that we think, because, y'all, you are a success where you are at right now. You really are. You're doing what most people won't do. If you take our bootcamp and run ads, you've already, in my opinion, this is not a statistically accurate statistic, but you've done more than 80% of people, because we all know someone who talks, they talk about it. They say, "I'm going to build that business. I'm going to sell my course. I'm going to build that widget, sell that thing, launch that company, sell the candle, sell the videography package, sell the course." It doesn't matter, we all know people who say, "I'm going to do it."
But y'all, how many people actually do it? How many people, actually, realistically, when you really sit back and think about it, how many people add 100 people to their email list and email that list? Like really? I don't know the exact number, we don't know the exact number, but I'm willing to venture just adding 100 people to your list puts you in the minority. It really does, and that's the crazy thing.
Okay, so get this, I actually had to pause my recording because I wanted to jump over to ConvertKit because I was pretty confident they had talked about this. So, get this, if you go over to ConvertKit, of their user base, the largest category is people with less than 100 subscribers. 94,000 people on ConvertKit's list as of 2022, this is from the 2022 report, have one to 99 people on their email list. We'll link up to the email marketing stats from ConvertKit as well because I really think it's worth looking at. The next highest list size is 100 to 249, and that is 11,000 people. Like, instant drop. So, if you have over 100 people on your email list, according to ConvertKit, you're literally in the top 20 to 25% of people. And if you have more than 250, you're in the top 15%. But how often do we perceive that people are out here making billions of dollars? Billions is maybe a little dramatic, but you know what I'm saying.
So, I want to step back for a second, because at the intro of this episode I said we were going to talk about champagne dreams on beer budgets. Here's the thing. Just like if you were to get a traditional job, if you were to get a traditional job and you were to start at $20 an hour, $15 an hour, and work your way up the ranks, your income grows with time. You start out financing the iPhone, but maybe 10 years down the road, you buy the iPhone outright. That's the conversation we need to normalize in this industry. And I know that I'm guilty of this, I think we're all guilty of this, it's easy to get swept up in the marketing messages, that, "Get it quick, get it fast, do it easy." And don't get me wrong, there's things you can do.
Like I firmly believe if you spend 150 to 200 in our bootcamp and you follow along, you can absolutely get 100+ leads on your email list, because I've seen dozens of people do it. What I haven't seen dozens of people do is go from zero to six figures in 12 months. I don't see that a lot. I see people go from zero to, "I'm selling a handful of courses," in six months. I see people start their practice and scale in their first year. And I want you to understand, this is my gift to you, if you will, and I hesitate to call it a gift, because you may not receive it or you may not receive it the way that I want to offer it. But my gift to you is this permission to know that you don't have to be the unicorn. You don't have to be the one who makes it overnight.
There's this movie that I really enjoy, which you may have seen, called He's Just Not That Into You, and there's this scene in it where she's talking about how she wants to be that one person who gets kissed in the rain and they come running down the street with the boombox and profess their love, and one of the characters says, "You know, those people are the exception, not the rule." And she says, "I want to be the exception." And the guy says, "But you're the rule. You're not the exception, you're the rule. Your history has shown you're the rule." And please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please don't think I'm saying you can't do it. Don't think I'm saying it's not possible. What I'm saying is don't measure yourself against the exception, because that is the marketing message that we're being sold. That is what people are saying.
They're saying, "You too can be this if you just do what I do." And, y'all, everybody is different. Everybody has a different business model, everybody has different products. And I don't care if you say, "Well, they sold a course for 997 on Evergreen, so I'll sell my course on 977 for Evergreen." What are they spending on ads? Who's their audience? What's their product? What's their messaging? What's their background? What's their audience? There's so much that comes into play. And frankly, if you follow me, you know that I built my business, Heart, Soul & Hustle, to six figures in the first year, but I had started studying marketing and online business literally 10 years prior. I made my first dollar online when I was 12. It took me 10 years to have that one year growth.
And I'm not saying it has to take you 10 years. I didn't invest in courses, I didn't invest in mentors, I didn't invest in trainings and walkthroughs and things to kind of shorten that window, and I still think that courses and programs and coaching can help you shorten those windows and expand your abilities. I'm not sitting here saying don't buy courses, don't have coaches, don't do those things. I do those things. I just bought a course a couple days ago on email marketing. What I'm saying is everyone's different and you shouldn't measure yourself against someone like me and say, "Well, he did it in a year. I can do it in a year," when we have completely different backgrounds and experience.
To put this another way, I sat down the other day, I used to do a lot of drawing, art, painting, and I was pretty good if I do say so myself. I used to be able to paint and draw, and I was pretty decent at it. And I sat down at my kitchen table, and I had a bunch of art supplies that I brought up from the basement, and I thought, "You know what? I'm going to get into art this year. We'll see how that works out." But I sat down and I drew, and I was really impressed with myself. I was like, "You know what? I'm a little rusty," but I was able to draw something, and it came out kind of cute looking. It was little mini-characters. I posted it on my Facebook, and we'll put it in the show notes as well, just so that you can see what I'm talking about. But the reason I was able to go into the basement and grab all my supplies and draw something cute is because I had that in my arsenal.
I had the tools. I literally had the tools in my basement, I didn't have to go out and buy them. So, I had the tools at my disposal. Number two, I had the skills at my disposal. I had the abilities that, yeah, I was a little rusty, but I had the abilities to draw. I had been practiced for years. I literally had practiced years before I put down a pencil several years ago. So, you could look at my drawing and go, "Dude, this guy just started drawing a minute ago. How is he so good?" Or maybe you say, "How is he so bad?" You can look at the pictures on the show notes and be your own judge. But if you measure yourself by saying, "This guy just started drawing today," and you don't look at the historical data and the access to tools and the things that I have, you'll never feel like you measure up, and that is what I want you to take away from this episode.
So, two big things. I have a favor. Number one, if you want to see the drawing and all that good stuff, do me a favor. Head over to the show notes, heartsoulhustle.com/nyap051, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap051 for Not Your Average Podcast Episode #51. And number two, I'm on Instagram over at heartsoulhustle. If you're listening to this and you made it this far, would you do me a huge favor and DM me? You don't have to post it publicly in your story. You don't have to share it and hope that people comment and connect with you. You don't have to do any of that. Just send me a DM and tell me what you think about this episode. I want honest feedback. Do we like these kind of state of the marketing or high-level conversations, or do you want me to go back to the, "Here's how to run your Facebook ads?"
Obviously, I plan on having more tangible, actionable stuff overall. That's what I've talked about on my show, but I really want to hear from you. Do you like this style of episode? Do you want more of it? Do you want less of it? I take all criticism as business. I don't take anything personally. So, shoot me a DM, let me know what you think. I hope you have an incredible week. I hope to see you in our Facebook Ads Bootcamp, and until next time, stay not so average.
