Interview With Sam England

Bill: Hey, it’s Bill McIntosh here and I have a really cool guest joining me, Mr. Sam England. Hey, Sam!

Sam: Hey, everyone!

Bill: First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to do this with me. It’s not often people are willing to kind of reveal what they’re doing and what’s working for them. So big thanks for sharing, first of all.

Sam: Glad to be here, really appreciate it. Thanks for you, Bill!

Bill: Thank you! What I want to dive into is you’re doing Facebook video ads and you’re doing them for, basically selling, mostly physical products, right? Maybe you can talk a little bit about what you’re doing, so you have to give everybody an overview of what you’re selling and how it’s working.

Sam: A lot of people don’t know that I’ve been physical product stuff since 2003, a lot of people know me from doing launches and selling software and stuff like that, but I’ve been doing ecommerce since 2003 and what I’ve learned the last couple years is that videos really work, they really help sell my products, they help me get ranked from some of my websites, some of the keywords and so on and so forth. From doing Facebook ads about the last year, what I figured out is that videos, I can get the clicks, I mean, the views a lot cheaper than I can get clicks on just doing the regular Facebook images and stuff and running ads that way. It’s been working really good for me now for almost three months. I did share what I’m going to share with you guys about a month ago with one private Mastermind group, not publicly, I’ve never shared this information and it’s nothing ninja-stuff, guys, but I’m going to show you what I’ve done and what’s been working for me and kind of how I’ve calculate it and stuff. Video is really big, guys, or up these days. If you look and see on Facebook and look at the timelines and stuff, you see a lot more videos now than you did traditional images and so forth.

Bill: Yeah, well, I mean, Facebook, this is their biggest push. Basically they’ve thrown down the gauntlet and they’re going after YouTube, I know that’s their strategy. They’re working really hard, they’re building new tools for advertisers, they’ve made the ad inventory cheaper, so you can actually get cheaper ad views, like you said, they’re actually basically giving us a discount for doing video ads, really. Then there’s a lot of space for free organic stuff, so then if you get a video ad that starts to take off, you get all this extra free traffic on the side, which is even better. Cool, go ahead, you want to dive into what you got, I know you had a little presentation, why don’t you do that?

Sam: This is going to be pretty quick, probably about 10 minutes, 15 minutes or so. What’s working for me is Facebook video ads and I want to show you exactly what I’m doing and what’s been working for me. I learned some of these strategies, some of the strategies I’ve been doing from trial and error on my own, before I started really getting deep into this, but then I got into a private mastermind, I got some really good tips. They weren’t really related to the type of stuff I was doing, it kind of was, but then as I touched on the tips that somebody else was sharing and it worked for me. I’m getting video views, not promoted posts. You guys know what a promoted post is, right? It’s when you upload a video and it says, “Promote Post” or an image or whatever.

Bill: Yeah, or they call them boost posts sometimes in a little button.

Sam: Yeah, boost post. I use these types of ads to promote my physical products, which works best for me. You can do them for a lot of different things, I guess it depends on the keywords you’re going for and the target audience and stuff as well, but I’ve tried to make money on the online stuff and it costs me a lot more per view than what I’m going to show you what I’ve been getting here recently on some of my campaigns. The make money online stuff, if you’re targeting, for example, like work-at-home moms, make money on Amazon, that kind of stuff, then your views are going to cost you a little bit more, that’s from my experience. This works really good for my physical product aspect for me, for what I’m trying to accomplish and how cheap I’m trying to get clicks. I’m getting 1 cent to 3 cent video views. A lot of my stuff is 1-2 cents and that’s the ones I keep and ones I keep ramping up. If we’re anywhere over 3 cents or 4, 5, cents I chuck them. Sometimes I even chuck them at 3 cents, it depends on some other factors and I’ll show you here in a minute. But 1-3 cent views, I prefer the 1-2 cent video views. I like to get 8-11% click-through rate and that’s usually my target goal and I like to get a 8-10 relevance score, and I’ll show you guys an example of that here in a few minutes. I like to start with 21-cent bids. I always start with 21 cents and that’s just from what I’ve learnt from other people and just kind of tweaking it. You can try different things, guys, for me it works for 21 cents and then I can usually get to 1- 3 cent video views. Remember, I do not use boost post, like Bill said a minute ago, they call it boost post, within your fan page. I think it used to be called promoted post, but now they call it boost post. If you upload a video on your fan page, for example, you will see a little button there that says, “Boost post,” within your fan page. Don’t do that, don’t use that option right there. All right, this is what I did, guys and this is one you’re going to look. You see here, it was a horse-talking video, I had the video made on Fiverr for $5 and it was the animated video and the horse is talking about a product that I was selling on one of my websites.

Bill: That’s hilarious! It’s a Fiverr gig of a talking horse, wow.

Sam: Yep, talking horse, brilliant. I’ll show you an example of the video here in just a second. I’m getting 1-cent costs. My clicks are 1,182 and this was done in May. I haven’t updated it yet, I should have took another screen shot, but I didn’t have the time, but I’m getting 11.78 click-through rate on that, and my relevance score is 10. Like I said a while ago, 8-10 is really what I like to target right here on the relevance score. I like to get 8-11% at least click-through rate and you can see right here where I had bid a max of 21 cents right here, but I was getting 1 cent video views on this one. What it was is a video, all it was was a video, it was a horse, and it was talking and all I had done is I took a video off YouTube and they just stripped the audio out of it and it was just an animated horse just sitting there jiggling, talking, and the guy just did a voiceover on it. Now, if you see here, I had 6 likes on it, but then I had 28 shares. That was a crazy. I had a lot of shares.

Bill: Where else do you get people like free sharing your ads?

Sam: Yeah, right? It’s crazy easy, isn’t it? The thing is, the videos that I’m doing are anywhere from 20-30 seconds tops, some of them are 15 seconds, they’re really short video, just want to get the people’s attention. Also, if you see this snapshot, too, when you upload your videos, make sure there’s not a lot of text in it. You guys know the text rule of 20% text, like on an image, that Facebook has? They also have the same thing on a video, but they don’t have it on the start frame, so if you choose the frame that you want— because I’ve tried to submit some of them that have a lot of text in them and they are denying it, but then when I go back and choose a different frame and resubmit it, what I found out is if I do something like this, or just put the 20% down there, and then the video starts playing, you can put all the text you want in it. So that worked really good for me. This was just one product, all I sell is one product. Here’s another one I did for a redneck product. You can see right here I’m getting video views from a redneck couple, and this was a redneck product, completely redneck. I’m getting 1 cent video views, I got almost 10% click-through rate, and I got a 10/10 score of relevance score. Now you see where it jumped down here, Bill, where it got really high, it jumped, it come up and it kind of sloped down? What happens, sometimes on the videos, you need to go ahead and pause them, just start another video, try another video. Sometimes people get, you’ll see the same thing over and over again in their feed and they’ll get kind of used to it after a while. I usually after about three or four weeks sometimes, it depends on how it slopes down, if it does like this, then I’ll usually change the video. Then I’ll restart this campaign in another month or so, and I’ll alternate them, so that’s really been working for me. I’ll show you the video, guys. This was Bubba and Sandy Lou. Seriously, I had these guys do this video on Fiverr and they don’t really—she dresses up in this wig right here and it was really funny because they get in there and act really stupid, and they’re still on Fiverr. Their name is not Bubba and Sandy Lou, but I can’t remember the names.

It wasn’t high definition, you can see it’s got black around it, it wasn’t high definition. They’re just going in there and talking about one of my products and acting really crazy. What I did was I put text in there, “Hey, these guys are really crazy.” There’s parts of the video that says, “She’s nuts!” This product was a hunting product, it’s a redneck hunting product and I put a duck face over her, I put stuff in Camtasia and I threw a duck on her one time because she was quacking like a duck during the video. So it got a lot of people’s attention for a $5 video! This cost me $5, it took me a few minutes to just put this text in the video after they sent it to me, in Camtasia, which you can have somebody probably do that on Fiverr for you for another $5, or pay them an extra gig or so to spruce some stuff up. But my point is, I wanted to really make this funny and it really got a lot of attention for me. Here’s how you get started. I’m just going to show you the really quick run down of how I do it and how quickly I do it. I just go down here and on your page you’re going to have a little drop down over here, you know that. I’ve got some other pages here, I blocked these ads out here, but you just go in here and create ads. You don’t want to do promote a post, like I said a while ago, do not do a promoted post. You just want to go up here and create ads. As soon as you get to this page, guys, you want to get video views at the very, very bottom. Get video views, it’s all you need to do is click that. Now, you put your page, your fan page or URL, your fan page here, you can start typing it out and it’ll usually pop up, all the fan pages you have, because remember, we’re still here at the get video views, that’s what I clicked just a second ago. I clicked get video views, and choose your page right here.

For example, I did one here, this is one of the products that I have out that I’m getting ready to sell pretty soon, but this is one of my fan pages. It comes up with the fan page and it puts the views for me. Pretty simple, straight forward, easy to do. In this particular instance, I chose United States and I target people in the United States and you can choose the countries you want, but I kind of like to keep this slimmed down to my target audience, especially if I’m doing physical products, I’m going to keep this for the United States and Canada. My company, my warehouse, does not ship outside of the United States and Canada, this is just an example. Now, this is my target audience, this is where the default is at, 18-65 years old. If your target audience is more like 25 or 28 year olds to 60 year olds, then you need to choose that. Mine is English right here, so I choose this English. But if you look here, guys, it says 169 million, that’s a lot, that’s way too much. I’ll show you where it’ll drop down here in a minute, so you want to really narrow that down because you’re going to be just throwing crap at the wall and it’s not going to stick, just hoping for something to stick, right? You really want to narrow it down. I like to narrow mine anywhere from 50-100,000, that range. What I did next, I went down here and I put my interests. So you go back and you can see interests down here and I’ll just kind of go slowly here so you can follow through pretty easily. Down here is interests, I start with English up here, remember, and these other things we did. What I tied to them, here’s I’m doing drop shipping, for example, on this one, if I was doing horse sounds, whatever it was, or duck stuff, hunting stuff, I would be looking for duck hunting kind of stuff, for example. It depends on what you’re targeting. I usually try to keep this within 2 or 3 here, no more than that. I try to keep this down here to 50-100,000. For example, this one come up to 110,000 people. I would probably take the order fulfillment out, to drop it down and probably get it down to 70-80,000, but I’m targeting drop shipping ecommerce, right? Here’s the kicker, guys, it’s when you choose online buyers, this works really well, it’ll drop this way down below, way down below the million. Behaviors, I like to target online buyers, and that works well for the US and Canada, tilt America, right? Now, here’s what I do to get started. I’m always $5 bid to see how it does for the first day. As it successfully gets running, some people say just do 20 or 25 a day. I feel if you give the money to Facebook, they’re going to spend it. They’re going to spend it as quick as they can for you.

Bill: They’re really good at that, aren’t they?

Sam: Aren’t they? They are! [Laughs] They will spend it for you, the more you throw out there, the more they’ll spend, the quicker they’ll spend it. So I like to do a $5 test and run it continuously, I like to run it continuously and just let it go. I don’t want to stop it because if it keeps doing good, the next day I will come and check it and see how it’s doing.

Here’s what I was telling you I start off 21 cents. You can start off whatever you want, 8 cents, 7 cents, 50 cents or whatever. This is just my key, it just seemed to work good for me and it might just be—just I just use it and it does work or when it doesn’t work or whatever, it’s just my magic number. But I like to try it out with 21 cents and it seemed to work really good for me. Even if it jumps down, sometimes when you type it in, you’ll see a box down here and I think it’s reddish or orange color, isn’t it, Bill? It’ll say, “Hey, we recommend you bid 76 cents,” or something like that. I’m like, “No, you’re nuts. I’m going to put 21 cents in here and I’ll ignore you,” because this is what I want. You can set your ad set name here if you want, like I’m doing video one and I’m doing views. If I was going to do another video with a different ad copy, then I would do video two and views. It depends on you, put whatever you want in there, it doesn’t make a difference, just doesn’t make any difference at all, it’s just help for you tracking this stuff. You can change that name later if you want, so that’s easy to change, just take a second.

Then here’s where you go up to load the video, simple, you upload a video, you choose the video that you had made. You can have them made on Fiverr, you can make them with Camtasia yourself, it’s just really easy, but Camtasia costs a little bit of money, it’s expensive, but there’s CamStudio, there’s a lot of other ones where you can make your own videos and stuff. I also do, like on some of my ecommerce sites and some of the videos I’ve done, is I actually did a walk through like on my website and showed them exactly how to add to cart and that kind of stuff on particular products and it works really well, just to screen share my screen. You want to upload your video, you might want to browse the library, but you want to upload your own video. What happens here is you see this little box that says, “text,” here’s where you put your title copy of what you’re doing. It only gives you, gosh, I can’t remember, it’s not many, I have 16 left here, so it’s only like 2-1/2 lines of stuff that you can put in here. But what I like about this as well is you see where it chooses button right here? Choose a button right there, guys, and it’ll drop down. What I do before I even get that button thing is I always remove mobile newsfeed, I don’t want to spend any more than I want. Sometimes videos don’t look right on a mobile. This is me, I always, always, always remove it because it just looks too small. It depends on you, but you’ll spend more, from what I found out, if you had that enabled, so I always hit, click remove mobile newsfeed, for videos. Other people have their own choices, their own preferences, it’s just how I do it.

You see up here where it says choose button? Now this is the cool part. I like to do “shop now,” because I’m going to have it send people to my website. I want them to go shop to my website and click that video and hit that shop now button and then I’ll put my URL in right here, and a display link you can put in here, too. The cool thing about display link, you can also put more text in here and you can also put this URL back down in here as well. But you put your website link right there and when they hit the “shop now” under the video and they’ll be taken to your website. Pretty cool! That’s it for this presentation. It’s pretty straightforward from what I’ve done with it. Like I said, I’ve been using this quite a bit lately and doing a lot of testing and it gets easier and easier, as I keep going along with it and I keep tweaking and testing things. Like I said before, if it gets down below 8% relevancy, I’ll usually shut it off. If it goes over 3 or 4 cents, or 5 cents, I’ll usually shut it off. So sometimes I’ll run the same video and run different ad copy and so forth within it.

Bill: There’s a couple things, too, I want to ask you some questions because I haven’t interviewed anybody yet, other than you, you’re my first guy doing ecommerce, like selling on Amazon or selling out of your own shopping cart, selling physical products. I’ve done some high-ticket, like guys selling art and things like that, but you’re the first kind of mid to low-ticket physical products guy I’ve got to talk to. There’s a few things I noticed you’re doing a little different, so I want to kind of zero in on those and ask you a couple quick questions a little follow-up questions.

Sam: Sure.

Bill: One of the things that I noticed is that your targeting is a little different. Where some of the other guys, they have a little bit of a different strategy, they’ll go really broad and then try to refine their audience down through retargeting and all these other strategies. It looks like you just kind of cut right to it and you go laser targeted trying to find a smaller audience, people that are going to be way more likely to buy your stuff because I mean, you’re looking for a purchase, like right after your video.

Sam: If I’m targeting a South Carolina Gamecock fan or a Clemson Tigers fan or something like that, then I really like to narrow it down. If I’m going to start doing multiple groups, like I was showing you, the different categories you could choose, then sometimes I’ll just run that one and I’ll run the same video and just target another group of people and see which ones does the best.

Bill: I noticed that one audience you had was like 100-and-something-thousand in size, is that pretty typical of the audience sizes?

Sam: Yeah, I’ll try to get it between 50-100,000, that range. Sometimes it goes a little over, like that one was 110, then I’ll still go for it. I just don’t like to target such a broad audience because I want to get people that’s going to buy. That’s from my experience, 50-100,000, right in that range, works, especially with physical products. It depends on your niche and stuff you’re working with, right?

Bill: Yeah.

Sam: It’s all about tweaking and so forth, you know, tweak and test the stuff and you’ll learn really quickly what works and what doesn’t work. Bill: Well, I think this is an important—

Sam: It’s a cheap spin. You think about when you’re doing the typical image ads and stuff, you can spend a lot of money and go through a lot of ad spend really quickly and video is just not as relevant, because you’re spending a penny, two pennies, right? A few. And you’re getting your point across.

Bill: I think it’s important, there’s a lesson here, too, in that you can’t just take one strategy and use it on all things. Depending on what your market is, what you’re selling, what your goals are, you got to tweak and refine your strategy. So here, if you’re selling physical ecommerce products and your stuff is what, mostly low ticket, kind of impulse-type purchases?

Sam: The products that I’m actually targeting is $80-100 products.

Bill: Okay.

Sam: I’ve seen about a 30-40% boost in sales when I started doing this on this particular niches I was working with, just in ones I’m showing you right there.

Bill: Wow, do you know roughly like what kind of ROI you’re getting? What does that represent, if you’re spending say $100 on a video ad?

Sam: My average spend, okay, for example, I was running on the horse one, I was running six different ones and just $30 a day, it was roughly, cost about $30 a day. I went from that website making $300 a day to about $7-800 a day. Sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more, but a lot of the good days were $7-800 days, so it sometimes doubled my profit.

Bill: Wow, so a $30 ad spend doubled your sales?

Sam: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Bill: Wow, that’s cool.

Sam: Yeah. It depends on the niche, too, it depends on the product, which season it is, if it’s a seasonable product, and the whole nine yards, right?

Bill: Yeah. Sam: So, yeah.

Bill: Yeah, I mean, of course everybody’s results are going to vary a lot, but one thing that I’m noticing is that the return on investment on these video ads for everybody I’ve talked to, it’s just nuts. I kind of feel like it’s one of those, when you kind of get in early and start a tactic before everybody and their brother is doing it and it works like incredibly well and that’s kind of like video ads right now.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. It’s like I was talking about Fiverr earlier, that’s a great medium to get videos done. I’m doing four, five, sometimes six videos a day, like they have puppet videos, that gets people’s attention really quickly, especially on physical products, they start talking about a product. But there’s a lot of that on Fiverr, there’s a lot of really, really good videos on Fiverr that you can get done for $5-10, a lot of them for 5, you have to search around to get the good ones for 5, but getting the better ones, it’s about $10 sometimes. You get Camtasia or CamStudio, you can do a lot of that stuff yourself, too, it’s got to be creative.

Bill: Yeah. I love the Fiverr gig and it seems like, most of your stuff seems to go like being humorous, so it’s funny or weird or something like that.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. I’m really big into the hunting niche stuff so I kind of try to make it funny with ducks and horses and turkeys and that kind of stuff, deer hunts and pigs.

Bill: The video doesn’t really sell your product really then, it’s more about grabbing attention and then getting them—

Sam: Yeah, from my perspective, I like to get their attention, yeah.

Bill: Well, cool. Okay, so those are a couple of real differences I noticed. You’re doing a lot more to grab attention as opposed to trying to pre-sell or do stuff like that.

Sam: You could do the same thing, you’re still doing the same thing with your video sales letter, but I recommend that if you do any video sales letter stuff, that type of stuff with the videos, I’d keep it short. Keep it short, sweet, and get their attention. They’re not going to sit there and watch that video for long unless it’s funny or comical and gets their attention that way, but it depends on yourself. You’re trying to really sell them something or get affiliate’s attention, for example, then it needs to be short and sweet.

Bill: Yeah, it’s almost like a commercial on TV, if you think about a commercial. 30-60 seconds and that’s it, that’s all they do on television commercials. It’s a kind of very similar approach, I think.

Sam: Exactly.

Bill: Cool. Let me think if there’s any other stuff I want to dive in and ask you about on your tactics. I notice you’re going desktop only. Typically desktop traffic is more expensive, too, so you’re getting desktop views for a penny, that’s really good. I think one of the things that you’re running into, because your audience sizes are smaller and you’re doing that kind of laser-focused approach, your ads fatigue, it sounded like you said about three weeks or so and they start to fatigue?

Sam: Yeah, they sure will. That’s why I rotate. Another video that’s similar to that one, and you can rotate them.

Bill: Cool, so maybe you’ll have the redneck couple, then a talking horse, and then a talking duck and then you just—

Sam: Use the same verbiage basically, just kind of change a couple, the bullets of it up and you know what I mean?

Bill: So run each one for a few weeks and then rotate to the next one and then rotate—

Sam: Yeah, it’s the same way with any kind of ad you run and stuff, after you get tired of seeing it after a while. You get tired of seeing it. You’re not going to watch the same video over and over again, it’s the same thing with running image ads. People see it’s the same thing over and over again, they’re going to get used to it and just going to scroll right on by it.

Bill: Well, cool. Any other tips you want to cover before we wrap up?

Sam: That’s it. I just recommend you keeping up your stuff, it doesn’t take long to manage your ads every day, you just got to pop in and take a look at your ads and see which one’s converting and which one’s not, which one is spending too much, doing over 3 cents or so. It depends on what your return is, too. If you’re spending 3 cents or 4 cents and you’re getting a big return, then keep running it. But my golden is 1 cent to 2 cents and just keep doing it and keep managing your ads. Don’t get on Facebook, another thing I recommend, stay off Facebook, just jump in and check your ads and get off Facebook, all right? [Laughs]

Bill: Oh, man, it’s like a trap, isn’t it?

Sam: It’s like a trap, yeah. Just go in there and manage your ads and check your ads and try to get out of there as quick as you can because you’ve got to be as productive as you can. It’s all about being productive and tracking your results and stuff and making more money, it’s the end result.

Bill: Yeah, exactly. Don’t let Facebook become a time suck. I know for me, I’m in there making an ad and the little thing pops up, “I wonder what that is,” I click to go see what the message was or what the post was and an hour goes by and I’m like, “Hey, I’m supposed to be working!” [Laughs]

Sam: Exactly.

Bill: Okay, cool. Let’s plug some of your stuff. Is there anything that you got going on? I notice you had an ecommerce thing coming up.

Sam: We have event in July, the 29th we have Ecom Domination is launching, it’s actually called Ecom Exposed. Yeah, it’s a really great product, teaching what I’ve done for 12-1/2 years now on ecommerce, since I’ve been doing it since 2003. I really want to teach people what I’m doing exactly from the website aspect of it, to building Amazon stores and eBay stores and that kind of stuff and what works for me. I’ve got some magic software along with it, it’s really cool, it helps you find hot selling products and that way you can clone them and get your own from China or wherever you want to get them. So that’s what I’ve been doing, Bill.

Bill: Well, right on. By the time this gets out there, that product will be on the market, where can they get more info about it?

Sam: EcomExposed.com or EcomDomination.com.

Bill: Awesome. Cool, so I think that’ll wrap it up. Again, I really appreciate you sharing what you’re doing because a lot of people aren’t willing to kind of pull back the curtain and show what’s going on behind the scenes. I think it’s important that people like to see what’s really working, what are we really doing. I know there’s a lot of products where people will say, “Oh, you need to do this technique,” and then it’s not really based on the fact that people are actually really doing it.

Sam: Yeah. Like I said, I learned a little bit of this from another group that I’m in, a private group that I’m in. I’m in a couple different masterminds and one of them, one of the guys is teaching about how to run ads, there’s a lot of it to do with t-shirts and stuff. But what I did was I learned some tips and tricks, what he was doing to kind of bring this into what I was doing. He was doing this with not video ads, but regular ads, regular image ads. So I took this and kind of went along with it and tested what worked for me and click-through rates and relevance scores and stuff like that, because it means a lot. If you don’t have good relevance scores, your click-through rate is going to suck and your video views will cost you more, etc., etc. So just learned from other people and then tweaking stuff myself. Like you said, everybody will learn their own little technique, their own little ways of doing things and what works best for them. I’m glad to share what I’ve shared with you guys and I hope you get a lot out of it.

Bill: Exactly, and we appreciate it. All right, well, Sam England, everybody, and if you are interested in ecommerce and you want to learn a little bit more about selling physical products on Amazon or maybe even your own physical products out of your own car, I think you do that as well, right, Sam?

Sam: Yep.

Bill: If you want to learn anything about that business model, go see Sam. He’s the guy to go learn. He’s doing it and he’s succeeding at it, so go learn from him. With that, we’ll wrap up. See you later, Sam.

Sam: Thanks, Bill. Have a great one, everyone.