Interview With Matt Ford

Bill: Hello again! It’s Bill McIntosh back with another interview from a stellar expert in something a little different than what you guys have been seeing so far. This time it is an expert on recruiting affiliates, so we’ve talked a lot about driving traffic to offers and sales funnels and even offline phone closing and all kind of different things. This time it’s a bit different. With me I have Matt Ford, so welcome, Matt.

Matt: Hey, great to be here, Bill. How are you today?

Bill: I’m doing well. Matt is underground, he’s so far underground you can tell it’s in the dark over there. He’ll be sharing the screen today. It looks like you’re having some webcam problems or something so our interview is going look like a guy in the witness protection program or something, we’re going to change your voice and keep you in the dark over there?

Matt: As long as I don’t sound like Darth Vader, we’re all good.

Bill: Actually that would be pretty cool, do a whole interview with the Darth Vader sound effect.

Matt: That would be really cool. It would definitely be a different angle they haven’t heard before, that’s for sure, right?

Bill: Yeah, the ultimate in black hat marketing.

Matt: That’s exactly it, right?

Bill: Okay, back on task here. Matt, you have been attached to several really big launches in the internet marketing space and maybe you want to give a little overview of what you do and how these campaigns relate to that and then we’ll jump off from there.

Matt: Oh, absolutely. Actually, my background, I came from sort of a financial services sort of business opportunity market and I was there for like six years and we built a company out to like 50 countries. It was really an interesting—learning sort of a lot about direct response. At the same time, I saw some red flags coming up in things on the horizon with the financial crises. I started a transition and I’ve been sort of behind the scenes on product launches since probably 2006, 2007 in some venues, everything from, obviously financial services, Clickbank and previously behind the scene on some launches there and of course now JVZoo. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with people such as Chad Nicely, Andrew Fox, Walt Bayliss…who else, I know I’m going to forget a few people obviously because it’s like every time you talk to me I have some sort of launch I’m working on behind the scenes or actively or whatever. It’s really cool because I’ve been highly involved in this community since a couple years ago. One of the cool things is, I’ve been like that like, I saw you back in San Diego, I’ve been at like 11 events since the end of February. I know, it’s go, go, go. What really what I tell people is there’s really two things when it comes down to product launches or any type of business. One is getting your funnel down. There’s some area of the marketing funnel where people are missing revenue, they’re not closing enough. The other thing is something I just call attention scarcity where people need to get more attention and right now, Facebook is such an awesome way of doing that. I mean, you look at what’s happening right now with, for example, the targeting on Facebook. We were talking about this the other day, is just phenomenal. You can go out, target people who like Clickbank or Ryan Deiss, Frank Kern, Brendon Burchard, some of the big names in the industry and actually start gathering leads from people who like people like that and start building a brand, building a profile, doing lead generation, but also doing retargeting at the same time, which is some stuff I’ll show you here in just a moment, what we’ve been doing a lot recently with video views. With the video views and the new retargeting feature, it’s really easy to build a branded custom audience very, very quickly.

Bill: Yeah, and that’s what I really want to focus on. You’ve done some cool stuff with combining retargeting with more like a sequence of videos, I guess you’d call it.

Matt: Yeah. That’s one of the things that came to mind really, really quickly was how to sort of build off sequences. If you look at like one of the reasons, for example, email is so powerful is the ability to send sequences to your list over and over and over again. Here’s what happens though, if you email your list three times a day for a week, you’re going to get a ton of unsubscribes and it’s going to really decrease your open rate, whereas on the other side of that, on Facebook, you can continue to run sequences to either customers, build leads, or for example, in the case study I’ll show you, is to JV audience and how to build that very quickly and then do deep sequencing. I’ll walk you actually through a campaign we have running right now.

Bill: Oh, that would be cool, let’s do that.

Matt: Right now I have these ads paused, as I’m actually in the middle of creating a new campaign for it, but this is, as you’ll notice, this is for a launch that’s actually going on right now. The day we started this was about three weeks ago, so we started this on June 27th, about a $453 spend, we’re at 3 cents per video view. Now, here’s what interesting, we’ve had 13,632 video views, a reach of 16,000 people. In the frequency, there’s two schools of thought on frequency and that is obviously if you’re doing like CPA offers, you want to keep your frequency low. On the JV side, I like to sort of keep the frequency higher because again, you want to get attention. These are over, I think it was like two targeted audiences. Now, to sort of frame up who we’re targeting, since I’ve been in the product launch arena for a while, I’ve built up JV lists that are easy for me to run on Facebook because I’ve been doing this stuff for quite a while. I run custom audiences but I also go after sort of specific interests as well. You can figure out whether you’re in the JVZoo space or you’re in the personal development or even some guys are in like network marketing biz op, that kind of thing. You figure out who the celebrities are in space and you can also target them, because if they’re any kind of an affiliate, there is some sort of interest there. We built this audience and here are the results. Basically these are five different campaigns and you can see, this is based on the number of video views. I didn’t get redundant screen shots of all of them, but you can see the video views that we’ve had since this campaign started and they continually update as the ads are running. I put the calculator to it, we’ve had 13,900 unique video views.

Bill: One thing I want to point out, too, is this campaign is quite different than a lot of campaigns. I notice, for example, cost per video view is a little higher, but that’s nothing, that’s no big deal at all. You’re still getting, for the audience that you’re reaching, you’re reaching a laser-targeted, very difficult to get in front of, audience. Those video views and even though 13,000 views to some people may not sound like a lot, that means a heck of a lot of money for you by the time this promotion is done. I just kind of wanted to orient people to that, they may be used to seeing campaigns that hit 100,000 views or more, but for this one, it’s more about precise laser targeting to a group of people that if Matt does a good job on getting them all on board to promote that launch, it’s going to be multiple six figures, possibly even a seven-figure launch as a result of a campaign like this.

Matt: Yeah, thank you for putting that out. One thing is, is that, and we’re really sort of building to sequence for the future so this is an audience that I will go after for the next 60, 90, 180 days. I think that’s when the cookies expire right now. Once we have it, we can start running sequences to them. In my mindset is this, is that you can, for example, I can tell you this, I’ve done the split-testing on this. If you run to certain specific custom audiences, you’ll get, it’ll cost you more per view than if you go after big interest in your targeting, say one million people in that audience, right? If you look, let me flip back real quick, you’ll notice that our reach is 16,000 because this is specifically, that’s the type of audience we’re targeting. We’re looking sort of long term, like you were talking about. What we’re doing from there is, I’ll show you on one of the follow up, they just watched a JV video. They watch the JV video, so the next ad in the sequence—and again, like these are not scores that you’re used to seeing because we have a very specific agenda here. If they watch the JV video, we are actually then following up with a demo video that they can watch. You’ve seen our JV video, you see a demo of Video Hub and why customers will love you for it. Then we have a video, we got 4,700 views here, our reach is around 3,000. Again, what we’re essentially doing is treating this as a sort of social video autoresponder to the JV’s that we’ve already targeted. Put yourself in an affiliate’s shoes, I mean, you’re a huge affiliate yourself, put yourself in their shoes, you watched the JV video, if you see a demo video hit your newsfeed, is that going to grab your attention?

Bill: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I love that, because now you’ve segmented out the people that saw your initial JV video and that’s who is now seeing the demo video?

Matt: Absolutely. One of the things I’m going to be doing more testing on in the future is really sort of like split-tree testing. If they watch video one but they don’t watch video two, segmented out, so you exclude the people who watch video two and see if there’s sort of some reengagement video I can run to them and get them more engaged. It doesn’t mean they’re not necessarily engaged, but there’s a reason they didn’t watch video two, maybe they were offline, maybe it just didn’t appeal to them or whatever. Maybe run a different style of video to them and grab their attention that way because the whole idea is we want to stay in front of people as often as possible. What’s interesting is even if you look at our website actions, again, they’re not what you normally see because one reason is what we’re looking at, for example, is we’re not necessarily looking for clicks, we’re looking for attention. You may see the video running constantly to you, you may watch the video, you may have already been to the JV page because you already saw the JV demo, so that’s going to skew those results as well. But what happens is, we run a video, we’ll start getting Skype messages or Facebook messages about a launch, if we’re running the right sequence.

Bill: I like what you said, it’s all about attention. I think that’s the case in any product market. In this space in internet marketing, make money online space, it’s a crowded market when it comes to trying to get attention from your affiliates because there’s a billion different products to launch, a billion different promotions they can hit, it’s very crowded and it’s hard to get their attention, so attention is gold. I think it’s the same thing whether you’re recruiting affiliates or in another market where it’s very heavily competitive. It is a battle for their attention and with the strategy that you’re laying out, you win that battle, you have their attention.

Matt: Right. I mean, like for example, we have a launch coming up in 30 days and I message you on Skype or we jump on a call and you may put it on your calendar, but what happens is, it’s sort of, it’s over here, it’s not on the calendar, it’s not front of mind because we all have other stuff going on. Then we check our promo calendar before the launch and see what’s on the agenda. If you’re constantly seeing things about the launch, like here’s a demo video, here’s a JV video, in the next thing, we actually took it a step up, let me show you this one, the next thing we did is if they watch video one, whether or not they watch video two, we showed them post-engagement. What this is, this is actually a case study, so there’s a lot of split testing going on as far as this launch is concerned, so this was actually a post-engagement. Chad had posted this video on YouTube, so we pulled it off of YouTube, put it on Facebook and started running this. Now there’s one thing interesting about this and another video view trick I’ll mention in just a second, we also put the link here. So again, this is going to skew our numbers a little bit as far as some of the stats, but one of the other things is, if you have a short URL, when you’re running video views in the newsfeed, you can actually put the URL in the description. It won’t track those clicks, you need to use some sort of click tracking, but you can actually put it in the description above the video. Now here’s what I found, is many times it wouldn’t let me put the http:// then doman.example.com. What I had to do is if I put www.example.com, it would actually work.

Bill: Oh, okay.

Matt: Those are all free clicks, so they’re watching the video, maybe they don’t want to watch the whole thing, but the link is right there for them to click because the other thing is, look, we’re in the community. We’re advertised to so much, it’s so ridiculous, whether it’s Skype or Facebook, email, videos, I don’t know what the average consumption of internet marketers consume of cat videos every day, it would be an interesting statistic. I mean, like we’re inundated with stuff, so the quicker we can act, the better. Our post engagements, have 996, a 1789 reach. Now, here’s the thing, 14 cents in engagement, the interesting thing is though, the frequency is 2, but look at the reach, it’s 1789. Again, this is just a small test, but these are people that have already watched one of the videos. We are just really building these sequences out.

Bill: I mean, the odds of an affiliate promoting for you on launch day, if you have done a sequence over 30 days, where they’ve watched your announcement video, then they watched a demo of your product, and then they watched a case study about how you’re going to help them make money during the launch. I mean, I would think the odds of them actually following through and promoting for you, I don’t know, go up 800%, 1000%, easily. That would have somebody basically locked in, you’d be top of mind, you’d be on their calendar, they would promote versus, like you mentioned, the guy that puts it on the calendar and then maybe even forget about it or just suddenly remembers on launch day.

Matt: Right. That happens a lot with launches because you’ve got to stay in front of them. I would tell people, like start 30, 60, 90 days in advance. But the thing is, you have to be top of mind. My thinking is, is this, what can we do all the time to get attention. I mean, that’s sort of what the business I’m in is based around and I’m in other markets as well, but the thing is, is even there, again, how to you get attention, how do you build a brand? I mean, we have a very noisy marketplace. It comes down to we got to keep their attention and we’ve got to sort of breakthrough all of that conversation that’s happening in their head, on their Facebook, on YouTube, on the calendar. We have to break through that and make sure they’re focused on promoting that. Now, the other side of that is, when it comes to JV’s, you have to be willing, and help them, so you have to build those relationships. Get to really know the people get to connect with people in the community and have them know it’s not just one of those situations where you’re there just sort of to fill your own needs, but you’re there to actually help them on their launches, maybe connecting them with—even if you can’t promote, maybe you can connect them with another affiliate and maybe you can help them with their email swipes, maybe you’re really good at graphics and you can actually help them create—the thing is, there is no one in this marketplace that is a master at everything. Find out what their needs are and help them fill them and that’s also going to also help you. They’re going to pay more attention. The other thing is, is that I see a lot of people using their pictures on Facebook. The challenge with that is, at least in their Facebook ads, that stuff starts to blend in with Facebook, everyone uses their picture on Facebook by default. What happens is it all starts to blend in. Again, the whole idea is to stand out. As you build these sequences out, you can start looking at new targets to acquire and when you figure out exactly what your returns are, you can actually, you can start scaling out, look at other interests, look at other experts in that space that you can go after that have like affiliates that you want and you can scale it out that way as well. Because there’s a lot of affiliates outside of our marketplace that don’t see a lot of these offers and that’s something really people should focus on as well. There’s a ton of really good affiliates over at Clickbank that aren’t really promoting, for example, JVZoo offers. There’s people who, like Infusionsoft, for example, that don’t normally promote JVZoo offers, but they may have a list that’s really perfect for a specific offer, but if they don’t see the offer, there’s no way they can promote it.

Bill: Exactly. Yeah, it’s an entirely new way to get in front of affiliates you would never get in front of otherwise.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. Always looking for new affiliates, because what happens is, is that after a while the stuff sort of starts to blend in, you’re always looking for fresh buyers. There’s a lot in the marketplace of repeat buyers, repeat buyers, but the really big money is going out and finding affiliates that have fresh buyers, fresh leads that can push through your funnel and get you making money. Because the whole thing is, is that people say, “What does it take to do a six- figure launch?” That’s one mindset, but really, people need to start thinking 30, 60, 90 days out, what would it take to do a launch that’s going to be worth 300, 400, 500K. If you’re shooting for 400-500K on your launch, it’s going to be much, much easier to hit 100K, because if you try to hit 500 and you fall short, who cares if you really wanted 100. Right?

Bill: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: That’s sort of like the mindset I have, it’s just that you really need to stay in front of them for the entire cycle, as soon as you start running ads, up until launch day. Really, you want to start as early as possible. It doesn’t take big budgets to do this, so if you’re planning a launch in November and you have the JV page up, you can run ads for $5 a day with video views or post engagement or just simple right-hand-side ads, but videos are so engaging, then you can start doing the retargeting. But a simple $5 a day budget is going to get you a lot of attention between now and November.

Bill: Absolutely. Let’s get into some tactical stuff. You mentioned some of the strategy about video and not to always just do a head shot, talking head videos. Anything you have discovered as like a successful style or theme when it comes to the videos themselves?

Matt: Like our case study video that Chad did the other day got a lot of engagement, people really liked it and it really—and then, because people saw it both in our Skype group and also on Facebook as well. They’re getting multiple exposures to it. Case study stuff works really well. It depends, there is a couple of things that we’re testing as far as like backgrounds on videos and things of that nature. I see a lot of people running like white backgrounds, but mix it up. I mean, if you’re doing green screen stuff, swap out the background and do some split testing. A white background may not convert as well as say, for example, a high resolution background image that you can pick up at, like Graphic River, for example. So split test those because also, if you’re running those to the same audiences, will notice the difference. Because what happens is, if you’re split testing variations of the same thing, it’s like someone comes in, maybe you saw them earlier in the day and they got a haircut. You know there’s something different, it catches your eye, but you can’t really put your finger on what it is. So you want to also find a way to sort of avoid banner blindness and the same thing with, that happens with video ads. The other thing is on that, is you can add your own custom thumbnail with videos. You can just test different custom thumbnails on your videos as well and start split testing that to see what gets the most engagement.

Bill: I like that, I like that. Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I haven’t done yet is due to the custom thumbnails. I’ll often do stuff at the very beginning of the video to visually catch attention. But I haven’t tried custom thumbnails yet.

Matt: That’s a great point, you have to absolutely grab their attention immediately. There is one thing I haven’t tested as far as that’s concerned, and that’s run like a really professional image versus something like, really—well, I haven’t done this with thumbnails on video—but run like a really sort of outlandish image for thumbnails. I think I’m going to test that next because I’ve done that with right-hand-side ads and it works really well because if something catches your eye, you’re like, “Why is that blue, orange, purple, and chartreuse yellow?” That’s one of those things, it catches your eye even if you don’t want it to.

Bill: That’s pretty important, really. In Facebook, it is like attention deficit zone, you know? It really is. As they’re zipping through the feed, you’ve got to jump out at them. I think color and things like that are important.

Matt: Especially with like the white background stuff. I’ve been seeing a lot of white backgrounds and to me, it really blends in. I don’t know, like sometimes I’ll scroll past stuff, I’m like, “Is that a video or not?” because at the same time, if it’s a talking person on it, it’ll get attention, but if it’s just a white background, it’s worth split testing. The newsfeed drives me crazy. I cannot tell you how many times I log in to check my ads or something and next thing I know, I’m reading the status, I go to save it or whatever, so I can come back and comment, then I’m all of a sudden, it’s like wait a second, I just logged into my ads account, what was I checking again, right?

Bill: [Laughs] Yeah.

Matt: I try to get to the point where I’ve got the Facebook ads manager app now on my phone. I try to check on that and try to stay off the newsfeed, because it’s really easy to get distracted, no matter how focused you are. I can’t think of the name of the app, but there’s ways just to like sort of blank out the newsfeed while you’re working. But at the same time, the only challenge with that with what I do is if there’s newsfeeds ads coming up about launches, I want to be able to see them.

Bill: Yeah, it is a dual-edge sword because I’m in the same boat. I like to see what is going on in the various groups that we’re in and what launches are being talked about or what kind of results people are getting, but it is so easy to end up and burn an hour on some silly distraction that sent you off on some tangent in Facebook. It’s a battle between trying to pay attention but at the same time, I also sometimes have to just get in, get it done, and get out.

Matt: Absolutely. We were talking the other day about how we hear people say, “I wish I got started in internet marketing 10 years ago,” and I find that funny because I was doing this stuff online, I’ve been online since I was in high school, but the funny thing is, it’s so much easier now to go into new markets, really, really easily. You can literally shoot a screencast video on your computer today and be targeting markets of people who built a huge brand over that same 10- year period and start running ads to them. You can do it for 2 cents, 1 cent, 3 cents, whatever, per video view and automatically get that attention. Whereas if you look at it, if you went to one of these experts and said, “Hey, can I run videos to your list?” They would say no! Capture them on Facebook and they have no say over that.

Bill: Yeah, they can’t say no, when you just target their fans on Facebook and they can’t say no.

Matt: Absolutely. There’s so much money out there to be made from the attention that you get, whether it be from JV’s or whether you’re doing your own thing, you have a coaching product, any kind of other business and you can go after your competitors with your videos on Facebook for basically nearly nothing. It’s pretty amazing right now.

Bill: Yeah, it’s crazy. We’ve got a campaign running right now that I think we’re at the point now we’re getting two to three views per penny. Now, that’s a bigger market, it’s not something as laser-focused as what you’re doing so as you mentioned, it gets cheaper on some of the bigger markets. That was never possible before. Like you talk about people saying, “Oh, I wish I would’ve gone in 10 years ago,” but stuff like this just was not possible to get three video views for a penny in front of three different people to get branded, have them watch your message, be exposed to your brand, find out about your product or your company. It was never possible before.

Matt: Absolutely. Look at the guru names, for example, that are in the IM space. If you go after those same keywords on Adwords, you’re going to pay a lot more for it. I go back a few years ago, I was doing launch sniping, for example, for some of the big launches just with Adwords, and I was paying like $3 a click. I didn’t care what I was paying per click because the revenue was just crazy, but the thing is, that you look at the same thing that you can do now with Facebook, I mean, it’s really cool.

Bill: Then as far as implementation of the campaign and any other tactical kind of stuff, is there any other best practices or advice that you could give someone who’s wanting to do this for the first time?

Matt: Write a bad ad and try it. I see so many people get caught up in, “Oh, my ad has to be perfect.” No. I mean, realistically, some of the ads that I create, like the image ads that I create, they take me like two minutes to put together and basically all they are is an image with text over it. They look like, basically I use like a SlideDeck tool. I put the image in there, put the text over and take a screenshot.

Bill: Wow.

Matt: I mean, it doesn’t get any fancier than that, right?

Bill: Well, it’s true. I can think back, there are plenty of times where I have a campaign and where I know that other people would’ve hired a video guy and maybe even got some copywriter involved to try to make it all beautiful and perfect. I turned on my darn iPhone, shoot it, stew it, run the campaign and have sales coming in that day. Versus when you sit around trying to perfect it, you spend a ton of money and then find out it didn’t work anyway.

Matt: Right. Take for example, say you have 10 preexisting videos and maybe they’re just content videos, like how to do a certain type of marketing. Instead of getting worried about it, upload those to Facebook, create like a custom thumbnail for each one, you spend maybe 20 minutes on it tops, don’t overthink it, plug it in, then start running that to the JV audiences you have or start targeting them. The thing is that you’ll start getting attention because what’ll happen is, there is the subject of the video right there for them to see, then it kick starts. You’re delivering content to them to show them that you stand out in that market. The other thing is, is that I would say if you want to do your own videos, don’t be afraid to go on screen. It’s so funny because if you talked to me 10 years ago, you would say, “Wow, he’s the most shy person I’ve ever met.” I can’t sell that now. I mean, people have met me at events or whatever, there’s some crazy stories out there. But the thing is, is you have to be willing to get to know people, be willing to connect. Life is so short, there’s no reason to worry about what people think, just get out there and be yourself. That’s really the key. I see so many people worry about so many things, figure out how you can deliver value to the marketplace before you start asking people to help you. Not only that, but if you start running videos to this audience, for example, or say you want to do a launch in another marketplace, target that marketplace with videos and guess what? 10 days, 20 days, 30 days from now, you’re going to know exactly, they’re going to know exactly who you are. My image templates that I use, I’ve started to get notice to the point I’ve got Skype messages some mornings from affiliates who sent me screenshots. They’re like, “I know what you’re working on right now.” I’m like, “How?” Basically they’re like, “Guess what? I see these images all over Facebook, I know your ads when I see them, dude.”

Bill: [Laughs]

Matt: That’s good, that’s really good because that means you’re getting the right amount of attention. I also see everyone worried so much about their cost and numbers. This is not only with the JV crowed, as far as their sales funnels, but with advertising in general. I can tell you in one marketplace previously, we would pay anywhere from $20-50-plus per lead without even blinking an eye, because we know what the numbers convert out at. So if you know your numbers, you don’t have to necessarily worry about your ad cost because if you know it’ll produce X-number of leads and X-number of leads leads to X-number of sales and it’s going to generate the cash that you want, then don’t worry about it. What you need to figure out is how much cash do you want and then reverse engineer it in order to get there. There are some really cool planning tools out there for that as well.

Bill: Yeah. One of the things I wanted to kind of cover as well is targeting. People are probably wondering how you target these guys. For you, that’s pretty easy, you have a list of affiliates who have submitted information, trying to do business with you at some point. You’ve compiled a list of email addresses of affiliates you’ve worked with. You just upload that list into Facebook, which in the training, I’ll show them how. But just upload that list of affiliates who have expressed interest in promoting your product and that’s how you target them. Someone who has not yet built an affiliate list, I would say first off, you need to get building an affiliate list right away. If you have a product that you’re planning on launching that’s even six months down the road, and you kind of indicated this earlier, get an affiliate page up and get started getting the word out, even if your launch is way in the future and start building that list of affiliates so that you can do these strategies when you start to get closer to your launch date. Another thing that I wanted to mention—and this may not always work—but it’s worth testing. Someone who has gone through this training or who has watched this video will have the skills to help someone promote a launch. There are ways through what’s called the Business Manager, where you can work collaboratively with somebody. Maybe you can help them promote their launch in exchange for the feedback of you being able to have access to that affiliate list to be able to also promote your launch later on down the road. There’s a lot of that that goes on in the affiliate community, guys helping one another cover their weak spots. I think I just wanted to throw out some of those ideas on how someone with no affiliate list can possibly get started to start targeting guys the way you’re doing it now.

Matt: Oh, absolutely, and that’s a good idea. You start really to form partnerships and it may even be with someone who can’t promote for you simply because their list is not necessarily in the same space. For example, if they do strictly SEO and you do strictly CPA offers, there may not be a lot of crossover there, but they may have some similar affiliates that they can run their ads to. Or there may be also just people that they know in the community that you don’t know that they can connect you with. The other side of that is, also start really planning out who your sort of target audience is. Then start making a list of who else is in that market. For example, Clickbank, a lot of people who are in different marketplaces also use Clickbank, they also use, for example, AWeber, or GetResponse, Sendlane, or there’s also, for example, you know, for example, go after some of the big names, the Frank Kerns, the John Reiss, the Ryan Deiss. There’s a lot of crossover affiliates. Like I was at Traffic Conversion Summit earlier this year, there’s a ton of people there, even though half the US just got slammed by snowstorms in like the sort of Midwest and also on the East Coast. I had clients who couldn’t even get out there, but if you look at, like for example, Digital Marketer, that company, and Ryan Deiss, a lot of those affiliates who were at that event, also like those companies, so you can target them based on interest.

Bill: That’s true. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, you might be targeting a little broad and you might target some of the “general public” but you’ll still get to those guys and then you can segment down and do some of your retargeting, like who’s actually watching your videos, and those are going to be the guys, more than likely, who are actually interested in promoting you as an affiliate. Or did they click and visit your affiliate recruiting landing page? Now you can zero in and follow, and some of the training we’ll release, you’ll be able to target the people that visit that page. You can kind of start to niche it down and find the guys that are actually interesting in promoting, by doing that, by targeting broad, like you’re saying, to Digital Marketer or Traffic and Conversion Summit.

Matt: Oh, absolutely. There’s two things that come from that, just came to mind. One is, we put retargeting pixels on every single page from the sales pages to JV pages. You want retargeting pixels everywhere. The other thing that you want to do is also you’ll notice in your sequencing, the deeper the sequence, the more attention you’ll get, but you’ll also notice those audiences become more and more targeted over time. So if someone watches one JV video, they may be interested, they may not be, but if they’ve watched five, six, seven, eight, nine videos, if they’ve watched quite bit and you’ve built up like the six points, you can do a test where it’s like, if they watch video one, then they can watch video two. If they watch video two, do they watch video three. By the time you get to like video six, seven, eight, nine—

Bill: Oh, they’re incredibly engaged at that point.

Matt: Right. So you have an audience you can run to for a long time and they pretty much know who you are. That’s the other thing, is like if you’re running a lot of videos, I’ll give you an example of what we did in another market outside the JV space and that was running video ads. After they’ve watched a couple of videos, they go to your landing page, there’s a video there, they opt in, you’re sending them quality emails with videos in it. At the time I had a business partner who was actually making all the call backs and she did all the videos. They knew exactly who she was, knew her by name, and had her in the caller ID because her phone number was at the bottom of every email.

Bill: Oh, wow.

Matt: It felt really strange because she actually got a couple marriage proposals, but that’s another story.

Bill: Change topic for a moment, if you don’t mind.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Bill: One of the things I know that you’re doing and that I just want to call attention to it, I think an average person that might have a product launch that they’re doing and they’re going to gear up, they’re going to do a video campaign, they’re going to recruit affiliates, they’re going to have their launch and then they’re going to go quiet. I don’t think you do that. I think you might continue beyond the launch.

Matt: Oh, yeah. It’s so funny because I was in the UK and I introduced myself to someone—I won’t mention his name—he laughs, he goes, “Yeah, I know who you are, you’re the most over-exposed JV guy out there.” Because people see me everywhere, they see me on Facebook and Skype, but at the same time, I’m also building the deep video sequences for clients. The thing is is that, I mean, here’s the thing, when contacting JVs and sort of keeping everything going as you build those lists, stay in touch with people. I mean, there are people who like necessarily, we can’t promote for or it’s not, our lists just aren’t a match, it’s like we’re in different markets, but we can share contacts as far as, “Hey, I may have a client for you, I need help with this project,” whatever it may be. I have a copywriting client for the last ten years who has never launched in this space, but has sent me a lot of business, has sent me affiliates. He’s not involved in this space, but I still get a ton of referrals from them. I mean, again, because you build those connections, you build those relationships. I was at his wedding last year.

Bill: In that case—tell me what you think about this. Let’s say you just finished a launch. You’ve done a video campaign, you now have a retargeting list, you have an audience you’ve been targeting, affiliates who have been promoting. What about doing like a postmortem of the launch? Kind of show the affiliates kind of behind the curtains and maybe do a reveal of like, “We did some split-testing and this headline worked the best,” or our upsell converted because of whatever or just sort of start to reveal some of their stuff that happened during the launch but drip it out afterwards. It’s something I’m going to be doing, so what do you think of that?

Matt: Oh, absolutely and that works really well. In fact, that’s actually going on for this launch right now, is there’s a lot of case studies being done because on this particular launch, there’s a lot of case studies being done. There was actually seven different versions of the sales letter that were tested and in that case study video, it talked about that, and which one actually converted better. Post launch, they’ll be some stuff rolling out and run those again. Also, by the way, that’s also recyclable content, so you can actually run that case study stuff, you can run it now, say one new video—say you have seven video sequence—run one on day one for two or three days, then day four to day six video two and so on. Then you can randomly cycle through them. Create a schedule and start rolling that stuff out. Then you can take, like for example, people who watch video one and also not doing the video view, but you can do a post engagement and send that to them with the video there.

Bill: Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I noticed the copywriting and split testing case study that you guys have been dripping out and that’s where I was thinking about, “Oh, I’m going to do that post-launch,” especially to keep affiliates engaged with me as a brand.

Matt: Absolutely. That’s the one thing is again, just keep people engaged. Everyone knows that for example, on your sales page, you get them to know you, like you, trust you in order to buy. But that’s also more important, I would say, in the JV community, too, because they need to know if they seem to—their customers, those are their babies so to speak, that they’ll be well taken care of on the support side, they’re going to get a quality product, it’s going to convert, and it’s going to be a mutual win-win experience for everyone involved.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely. I thought, well what you said, too, it’s probably more important on that whole know, like and trust thing when it comes to affiliates. I know it’s that way for me and I can imagine for most affiliates, it’s the same way. I’m just not randomly promoting just sort of whatever comes across my plate. It’s people that I have relationships with or I feel like that even if I haven’t done business with them before, that I know, like and trust. Otherwise, I would never just hit my list with something that I have no freaking idea of what it is.

Matt: Right. Not necessarily in this marketplace, but there’s others, you watch a whole video, they’ll send you the OTO links and you watch the whole thing. You still have no idea what it is. I mean, seriously, well, you’ve seen them, too, where you go through the whole thing and it’s like, “What just happened? What is that? What does it do? Why would people buy this?” It’s funny, but from the social side, as far as how much engagement can you really build, keep in mind there are people who, whether it’s in this marketplace or not, who meet people, who they only know through Facebook, but they become friends. There are people who, like I know examples, people basically meeting up all the time.

Bill: Oh yeah, at events and stuff that we go to, I know it happens to me, I constantly run into people that I have, it feels like we’re buds, I talk to them on Skype all the time or on Facebook, and we may have done that for years and never actually met. Then all of a sudden you’re at an event and it’s like, “Oh!” First time I’m meeting a person when you already feel like you are the best of friends.

Matt: Right. I talked to someone in the UK—I won’t mention any names on it— but he was like, “You know, it’s weird meeting these people in person when they’re actually just little icons on my computer.”

Bill: [Laughs]

Matt: I thought to myself, you know, I never heard it put quite that way before. That was a first. I’ve heard a lot of things about internet marketing and JV’s and stuff, but I was like, I have never heard that.

Bill: Wow, they’re people, they’re not just pixels, how about that?

Matt: I know! It’s like I just woke up in a different world.

Bill: [Laughs] Well, right on! I think at this point we’ll wrap things up here. Any final words or advice you want to let them know before we do that.

Matt: Basically just take action now. I see this whole problem is, as I mentioned before, people really, they’re not testing enough and they’re not getting enough attention. Realistically, it doesn’t have to be perfect. There’s never been a perfect sales funnel, there’s never been a perfect affiliate campaign. I don’t know anyone that’s done them, but that’s the thing though, you have to get out there, take action, learn from your experience, when it comes to creating videos whether you’re outsourcing them, you’re doing screencasts, you’re on video. The thing is, is that video one will not be as video two, video three, video four, and so on. The other thing is, make sure you’re really paying attention to your targeting. So you’re really going in and also dive deep. If you look, for example, someone like Frank Kern or Ryan Deiss, they’re very well known, for example, in that internet marketing space, but in other market spaces or even here, there’s people you can target, whereas they may be more involved in like the business opportunity market. But you’ll notice a lot of the same affiliates will promote for them, but you may not just be following that market. Sit down and make a list and then go through Facebook and figure out who you can target because some of those lesser-known experts are actually going to have more targeted people who are liking their pages and their communities. That’s something else to keep in mind, but really don’t be afraid to build out content, to build out the sequences, and really just start to focus on how much attention can I get and start early? If you start promoting and keep this in mind, guys, a lot of the top affiliates will actually have their calendars booked up four- to-six weeks in advance. You want to start getting attention like tomorrow, today, like get it done. Just take absolutely massive action. Grant Cardone wrote a book called The 10X Rule and basically the whole thing boils down to whatever your goal is, figure out what your targets are and what actions it requires and do 10 times whatever it takes. Realistically, that’s really great mindset for the ads. My vision is is every time they log into Facebook, they see one of my ads. I haven’t accomplished that completely yet, but that’s what sort of the target is. Absolutely mass exposure to the point they think I may live in their computer or something.

Bill: [Laughs] Stop following me, man!

Matt: Exactly! I mean, that’s exactly it. That comes with the ad variations and everything else, so they don’t go banner blind, keep rotating through stuff, content post, images, videos. You’ll get massive attention, you’ll keep them engaged and once you sort of dial that in, you can use it over and over and over.

Bill: Awesome. That’s great stuff. I really appreciate you joining me and giving up, opening up and sharing what you’ve been doing. I know it was something that you didn’t take likely, to actually kind of reveal this and share this so other people can use it.

Matt: I really appreciate the opportunity and yes, this is not something I talk a whole lot about, but I think it’s really important that people really sort of dig in and dial it in so they can be more effective with their launches because the more effective they are, the better our marketplace becomes and the more people benefit. It’s a win/win/win all around.

Bill: I agree. All right, well, thanks again and with that, we’ll wrap it up and we’ll see you on the next video.