Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 12 - New Book One Year Later
Synopsis:
In this revealing case study, Mike Shreeve breaks down the first year of launching a brand-new business and book funnel: 12,000+ books sold, $183 average lifetime value, and $2.2M in revenue—despite major media buying missteps.
You’ll learn why a funnel isn’t a business, how to thrive in jaded markets, the importance of writing a genuinely good book, and how high-quality sales calls differ from VSL funnels.
Packed with lessons on ads, lifetime value, scaling, and keeping fun at the core, this is essential for entrepreneurs exploring Peaceful Profits courses, Peaceful Profits services, and proven Peaceful Profits marketing strategies.
Transcript:
New Book One Year Later
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for taking a listen to this episode. We're gonna be talking about a case study review of a book that we launched for a brand new business. So both the book and the business started almost exactly one year ago. I'm recording this now on January 8th, 2022.
So we're gonna be analyzing 12 months, which puts us back to January of 2021. We'll take a look at all the numbers. I'll break down some of the lessons, and then I'll show you what we're gonna do next for this particular business. So let's go ahead and break down the numbers. It's the stuff that everybody's most interested in.
This book launched in mid-January of last year [00:00:30] and sold 12,034 copies. So this was a book inside of a book funnel as we teach and help our clients to do. We've done 50 of these so far with clients, and I've been doing this myself since 2012. And I have to tell you, 12,000 books in a year is significantly lower than I would've expected.
That comes out to about 32 books per day. I was quite disappointed by that, especially since so far in 2022. That same book in the same funnel, no changes to the funnel. No changes to the book. Has been selling 150 copies a day so far. Basically [00:01:00] since the second week of December. And I'll explain a little bit why, but basically it's because we hired really bad media buying agencies more than once this last year.
So 12,000 books over a year is, in my opinion underperformance pretty significant underperformance for what we expect for our own stuff internally. Now, the, so those numbers are disappointing, but we had a lot of other really great numbers, which we're very happy with the average lifetime value. So of somebody who purchases the book, on average, they go on to spend $183 and 91 [00:01:30] cents.
So everybody who buys a little low-cost book within that first year ends up spending about $183. That's really good for us. We like that number. I prefer in general to have a lifetime value above 2 25 if I can. That tends to work within this model and with this particular business. We can absolutely do that.
You may be asking, how the heck do you get an average lifetime value of that? You know that, that much. And it all has to do with the backend. What are the offers that you're selling people after they purchase a book and read the book? That's really where you are able to increase that. So this next year we'll probably focus a little bit on, on upping [00:02:00] that to two 50.
I think we can do. But we're happy with that 180 3. That 180 3 really helped us through the bad media buying times. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we go to the lessons that we learned. Our average cost to acquire a book buyer was about $41. So for every $41 we spent, we made $183 91 cents.
That's a return on ad spend of 4.48 x. We're happy with that. I prefer to get above five x if I can when I am especially within the first year of a business. 'cause you have that first year advantage where people don't know you. There's just a lot of curiosity, [00:02:30] your offer, new, you haven't been, copied by a lot of people, things like that.
But 4.48, considering what happened to us with media buying this last year I'm, I'll take that. That means that our total revenue for the first calendar year, first 12 months was 2.2 million. So 2,213,337. So we'll take that, we like that. We off of a 4.5, basically 4.48, 4.5 x roas. To get a 2 million revenue number out of that.
That's fantastic. We love it for the first year. We love it. It was a brand new business, brand new book, brand new funnel, brand new everything. [00:03:00] So we're happy with that. Our goals for 2022 are much bigger, but let's break down first the lessons that I learned. Again, I've been doing this since 2012, so I've been writing new launch in books.
I've been a professional writers since 2007. The numbers that I just shared with you, your mileage may vary. Not every single funnel does as well. Not every single business does as well. I've been doing this for a very long time. But also, even though I've been doing this for a long time, every single time I launch one of these things, I learn something new and sometimes it's a reminder of something I already learned, but it's a reminder at a deeper level.
But oftentimes it's just something new that I hadn't really anticipated [00:03:30] before. So I always love sharing these lessons 'cause they're, they were, lessons to me as well. So the first thing, and this is something that I tried to reiterate to my clients over and over again, but this case study really proved it that funnels are not your business.
A, A funnel is not a business. A funnel is just a mechanism to grow a business that exists. You might not even be ready for a funnel if you don't actually have a business. You might not be ready for a funnel if the business that you do have is a business you hate. It's why when we bring people [00:04:00] into, say for example, our implementation programs where we're helping you write your book, get your book going, things like that.
People are always surprised because section one of our program is getting your business right first. I don't recommend that you worry about trying to write a book and build a funnel if you don't actually have a business yet. And if you hate the business, and here's an example. Let's say that you offer copywriting services and you charge a hundred dollars for a sales page and your goal is a million dollars a year.
Your business is currently contradicting [00:04:30] your dreams. It is in direct conflict with where you're trying to go. You will not make a million dollars selling sales pages for a hundred dollars. You might make a million dollars in revenue, but just the cost to get someone to buy a sales letter are from you you'll not make a profit and you'll run yourself into the ground trying to deliver on that, even if you try to hire juniors and get people to write them for $50 a sales page for you.
So a lot of people have businesses that are in direct conflict with their goals, and they think that slapping a funnel on it will somehow. Make it fixed and get it fixed. That's not how it [00:05:00] works. You have to fix your business first, then do a funnel. And we love taking clients that are writing books and want a book funnel and all that kinda good stuff.
But we always make sure that when we're working with them, step one, we call it the validation process. You validate that the offers you're running, the math makes sense. It's incongruence with the goals that you actually have for yourself, et cetera, before you pour gasoline on the fire. 'cause that's basically what a funnel is.
Okay, so that's, that's one part of understanding that funnels are not businesses, but also when you launch a funnel, it accelerates everything. So a lot of people, they say, I want growth and I want it yesterday. [00:05:30] And then growth happens, and then they're like, oh, shoot, I was not ready for that.
Growth includes things like hiring growth includes things like setting up different tax structures and finances is, the growth includes things like protecting yourself legally that you didn't even think you had to be protected for in the past and et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot associated with growth.
Writing a book, putting it in a funnel and launching it to the market. That's just the start. Okay. That's getting a ticket to the show. Then you have to actually show up and do a lot of other stuff in order to. To [00:06:00] get from the funnel what you actually want, right? You want a lifestyle, you want to be able to keep your revenue.
Or another way to say it is to keep as much of your revenue as possible, so have as high a profit margin as you possibly can to be able to work with the people you wanna work with, et cetera, et cetera. A funnel doesn't fix all that, it just accelerates what's already set up. So that's always a good lesson to learn.
And this year we really felt it because to go from zero to 2.2 million in one year. Off of one book in a book funnel. There's a lot of growth stuff outside of just marketing and sales that [00:06:30] had to take place. There was a lot of putting pe the right people in the right seats, getting systems built making sure that we were protected, making sure that.
The, we were taking care of our people, hiring the right teams, making the right decisions along the way, making sure we were serving the right people, and all that kinda good stuff. That's always something to remember. We, we throw out, Hey, we made 2 million in 12 months, and everyone's let's go for it.
And I'm always like, okay, yeah, let's go for it, but let's understand what we're going for. Build the funnel. That's just the start. The real work happens after that. Okay, next is this is [00:07:00] a fun reminder. This is the first business I've started in a long time. So this business was started in 2021. The last business I started was in 2015.
I still have that business. And then the business that I started before that, I think it was late 2013. I started one in 2012 and then one in 20 2007. So I currently own all of those businesses still but this is one. And this is interesting because in the world of internet marketing history, the difference between 2015 and 2021 is much bigger than the difference between say [00:07:30] 2012 and 2015, not just in years, but in progress.
2000 15, 16, 17, that's when Russ Rafino and Sam Ovens and all these types were really starting to make a big name for themselves off of VSL. And running cheap traffic to short videos and using hardcore sales tactics to close. And that's that's how far and how old some of this stuff is that people are still hanging onto even though it's seven years later.
But one of the things that was really interesting to me in launching this business now in 2021 [00:08:00] was trying to figure out how can we cut through a very jaded marketplace. So this book. And this business that I started just this last year was in a highly competitive and very jaded market. And I think there's a misunderstanding around this concept of a jaded marketplace or jaded prospects because a lot of people think, ah, jaded means they're cranky and they're angry and I would never wanna work with them and they'll never believe anything you say, and that's not it.
I'll give you an example of someone who's jaded me. I'm very jaded around media buyers right now and the media buying agency industry as a whole. [00:08:30] 'cause this last year, we got took to task here. We were paying, at one point, we had 15,000, $20,000 a month, just the fee. And they were delivering three times worse, the results than we could get on our own.
That's not including the cost of the fee. And this was again, and again. We'll talk a little bit more about media buying agencies later. But the, I am jaded, but I still want somebody to run traffic. And this is a truth about jaded markets that people overlook.
Jaded markets aren't broken markets. People who have gotten ripped off before still [00:09:00] have the same dream that they had when somebody took their money and didn't deliver. They still have that dream. They're just way more skeptical. They're way more cautious. They don't believe as much. And so we launched this book in this market and we run a book funnel and we get it in people's hands.
And it was shocking at how. Many people read the book and showed up to the sales call saying, I've been screwed by this person and this person, but I'm coming here because I read your book and I think this is gonna work for [00:09:30] me. Now why I'm not saying I'm a good writer or anything that's not the point of that story.
The point of that story is to compare that experience to say, webinar, VSL, webinar, VSL, your job is to make promises and then to try to justify those promises and get them to book a call, right? That's a webinar. VSL I'm gonna make a whole host of, learn how to do this and five days or whatever it is, and then I'm gonna try to justify that and then hopefully you'll believe it.
It's a very forward approach. And what's wrong with the jaded market is that not even that they've seen the promises [00:10:00] before. We could go back to Eugene Schwartz, customer awareness spectrum and over exposure spectrum, which is also a great thing from Eugene Schwartz, which a lot of people don't talk about which we don't have time to talk about here.
But basically people get exposed to the same promise over and over again. They get bored by it. I'm not even talking about that. I'm just talking about the fact that most webinars, most ESLs start the conversation with something that's very easy to deflect. Meaning the person who signs up for the webinar person who's even lead magnet psych, right?
There's a lot of different ways that people are marketing right now where they're coming in hot and heavy and [00:10:30] they're coming in with things that a jaded marketplace says, Ugh, not this again. And they just stop listening. They turn off what a book does, if it's written correctly. What a book does is lowers the defenses of somebody who's jaded because the purpose of a book is not.
First to sell and second to offer value. It's first to offer value and then act as a sales asset. And that seems like such a nitpicky thing when you say it out loud, but in practice it's a huge difference. In practice, it would [00:11:00] be the equivalent of instead of doing a 90 minute pitch webinar, which is what most webinars or VSLs are these days, offering a four hour teaching webinar with a soft call to action at the end.
You don't do any selling during the whole four hours. And how many of you're like, Ooh, that makes me comfortable. So and so said Don't do that, blah, blah, blah. That's why a book is so valuable because think about the gurus, who have books that you enjoyed while you were reading that book.
Did you sit there and say to yourself, ah, this is just a big old sales pitch. Yeah, [00:11:30] probably not. If it was written, if it was like some low on the totem pole, mini guru who doesn't really know what they're doing and they write a book where it's all pitched the whole time and you're basically just re reading a long sales letter, probably it was obvious to you.
And what did you do? You closed up. But say for example, I'm just gonna use Russell Brunson for example, his expert secrets and.com secrets and traffic secrets. When people open up that book, they are ready to take a lesson. What's happening is Russell Brunson is selling them, but that's the secondary.
Point of the book, [00:12:00] and this is about sitting down and writing your book and the strategy you have mentally about what you're going to put into the book, right? So what's the purpose of the book? Is the purpose of the book to be a sales asset first and then to help people? Or are you trying to create something that's gonna help people so much that it becomes a sales asset?
It's a big difference, and it matters not for a feelgood, kumbaya reason, but it feels good. It does feel good, but it it's important to consider and to strategically make a decision [00:12:30] about, because you're probably operating in a fairly jaded market, and you have to figure out a way to get into their mind.
Sales is all about belief change, right? If I come to you and I don't believe that I need a bag of apples. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to convince me? Yeah. What are we really talk, what are we really talking about here? You're trying to change my belief that I currently have about that bag of apples.
Books are great ways to change beliefs. Every major religion has a what? A book. [00:13:00] Entire belief systems are built around books. So when you go to write your book. Yes, it will be a sales asset, but if you're operating in, pretty jaded marketplaces, you have to approach it differently than you do most of your other marketing and sales campaigns and strategies that you put together.
If you're constantly trying to cut corners, 'cause you're just like, I just want this to sell, it's probably gonna bite you in the, but in the end you'll have a less effective book. So something to consider. Again, look I help people write books and put them in book [00:13:30] funnels and et cetera, but I also think not everyone's ready to create something like that.
Some people are just in a more desperate place, and they are, they have to resort to, their motivation is trickery. I want to get somebody to buy a book and they want to trick them into booking a call with me. That'll bite you in the butt. No one's gonna, that's not gonna work. If it does work, it'll work for a little while and then it'll stop working.
You want a book that people share with their friends for free if you can, because they, it was so good. Like they just take a copy of the book and they give it to their friends. [00:14:00] If you can do that, then you can penetrate saturated, competitive, and jaded markets with real, relatively easily. I was surprised this last year to see how easy it was to.
To make my way into that market. Okay. Number three is that good books matter. I suppose I squished those two things together. It's worth saying again. Good books matter. Don't cut corners. Make good stuff. It the in a book funnel. A lot of people get confused. They think that the most important thing in a book funnel is the funnel pages, the order bu [00:14:30] the upsell checkout page.
They think it's the pricing of the other offers. They think it's the bonuses, they think it's the ad copy. They think it's the media buying. The most important thing in a book funnel is the book. When you have that good book, then you two can learn lesson number four. Now, I wrote it down in my notes as client quality equals high call volume equals low plan.
Accordingly. What I mean here is earlier I mentioned Russ Fino and Sam Ovens, and the whole VSL thing and how that got popularized. One [00:15:00] of the sub genres that emerged from those very successful coaches having thousands and thousands of students, right? So Rafino, Sam Evans, et cetera. They popularized this model, this VSL model, run traffic to a video.
Then Phillips sales calendars there was a new demand created from that, and that was thousands of coaches, business owners, et cetera, realizing they can't take all these calls. One, because the calls are pretty low quality and two. They have so many calls they need to hire other people. They wanna work themselves out of, doing eight, 10 calls a day.
And so you have this new sort of genre [00:15:30] emerge of the high ticket closer, and now you have a bunch of gurus creating these high ticket closer programs. And you now have thousands and thousands of people who have bought into the idea of being a high ticket closer. And that just like most things in internet marketing.
One high ticket closing program is pretty similar to the other and the other. And the other. You have a few core people who are copying each other, and so certain patterns and ideas emerge in this industry of high ticket closing things like the one call close, things like fairly [00:16:00] aggressive sales strategies and tactics.
In some cases questionable sales strategies and tactics. And you. If you are a business owner and you are trying to grow a business like we did this just last year, I'm telling you right now, I did not take sales calls. I didn't take one sales call, all of all of 2021. We hired straight away. We'd done it before.
We know how to do it. The problem is that selling off the back of a book is different. Then selling off the back of A-V-S-L-A webinar or organic or other methods. One, the prospects are significantly [00:16:30] more educated about what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it. So the call quality volume goes very high.
It's I would say 10 to 20 x higher than off the back of most other methods. Which is wonderful unless you're using old sales tactics. If you're using the one call close, you're essentially handling precious diamonds with sandpaper gloves. Or I dunno what chips, diamonds, but I think only diamonds can chip diamonds.
But the point is that you have this precious prospect who is [00:17:00] emotionally invested in you and they show up to a call and you have a salesperson who is running them through a. A very rigid, very aggressive script. And it's, imagine if this was in real life. You have a very good friend and they come over to your house and all of a sudden you're trying to put them through this very rigid and aggressive conversation template.
You'll find that person changes their opinion of you. If you're following, say for example, the one call close where if somebody doesn't close on the first call, you never talk to them [00:17:30] again because you know that this is a volume play and you're just like whatever. Tomorrow I've got eight more calls.
I don't care. With the book funnel, you're gonna have a much lower call volume. That's just the reality of it. You'll have a much lower call volume than on the back of, say, A ESL. The quality will be significantly higher. We close, on average, 45% to 50% of our calls. Sorry, 55% of our calls on offers from 10,000 all the way up to 50,000, $55,000.
And so the, this is a, these are very high quality calls for those of you who know VSL funnel numbers and are familiar with those. [00:18:00] But, oftentimes we integrate more follow up, active follow up in our sales process. One, 'cause calendars are typically less full, so there's time for follow up.
And two, because it allows us to work with these higher quality buyers. I'll give you an example. I never close on a one call close. And I am, I always say stuff and I think I probably sound like such an arrogant, a-hole, but I'm technically a whale client in the sense that I have no problem giving somebody $20,000 a month to offer something for me.
That's, yes, do it. If you can do it, let's do it. But I never call on one [00:18:30] close because I just, I don't, that's a crazy way to make a decision, like a 21-year-old telling me that if I don't close in the next 10 minutes, my family is gonna disown me. I'm too old for that. I'm too sophisticated of a buyer, and I don't mean sophisticated in that way.
The Eugene Schwartz customer awareness spectrum. I'm too far along in my exposure to the market to know that's true. And I would say in 2022, I don't know too many markets that aren't [00:19:00] made up, mostly of sophisticated buyers. When there aren't very many undiscovered niches at this point in the game, internet marketing is old now.
I've been doing it since 2007. Okay? So it's old. Like it's not as undiscovered as people want you to believe when they're trying to sell you something. And so what happens is when you have a book, you're able to actually work with significantly better clients, in my opinion. If you make adjustments to your sales process to, be able to sell to those people. Whenever I try, whenever I get one call closed, attempted, [00:19:30] I'm very much turned off. I see that as an immature, and I don't mean, again, I don't mean immature as oh, you're so immature. But I see that as especially if I'm looking for marketing advice or something trying to buy a marketing program or hook up with a marketing coach or something, sales entrepreneurship or something like that.
If I see that they're running one call closes and they've got a 21 on 21-year-old on the call telling me, my wife's gonna disown me if I don't buy this thing by the end of the day, I just assume that the rest of their business is like that. And then I realized they can't help me because I'm further down the road than they are even.
Does that make sense? This is not true just in marketing. [00:20:00] This is true in everything. This is true in fitness and relationships and all that kinda stuff. So the point that I'm trying to make in the lesson that I learned here is, there's a lot of habits and practices in the world of sales and selling that was developed because of a single business model, which is the VSL model.
And if you're hiring or you yourself, are used to the VSL model or were taught under the VSL model, you may need to make adjustments if you introduce a book funnel to your business. In fact I would almost bet all the pennies in my pocket that you need to have make some [00:20:30] adjustment to the way that you sell.
So just something to consider. Client quality will be high call volume will be low. Plan accordingly. Alright, lesson number five is that in 2021, traffic was hard for everyone. Traffic was hard for everyone, and I don't think it's going to get easier. So be careful. So be careful. We hired several media buying agencies this last year because this was not a primary business of mine, and I just needed it to be taken care of.
I didn't have core people that we could really utilize in those areas. [00:21:00] And it was the biggest mistake of 2021 for me, and we hired four different agencies. And let me explain what happened so that you have an understanding of what is going on. Because I don't think, look, I'm a business owner.
I've been scammed like everybody else lost thousands of dollars, et cetera. That's part of business. This is the game. This is how the game is played. You win some, you lose some, et cetera. So I'm far enough into this thing to not hold personal grudges or anything like that. In fact, I think that there are some core issues going on.
With media buying agencies that I wanna share with you, not because I'm trying to revolutionize the industry or anything, but I want [00:21:30] you to understand what's going on so that you don't get sucked in unnecessarily. So here's how the media buying agency model has run up to this point. It's mostly Facebook ad agencies, right?
That's the bulk majority. The reason is because Facebook is a very easy platform to run traffic on. It is a platform that does most of the hard work for you. Facebook's algorithm is extremely proficient at identifying buyers or, for example, people who opt in. So whatever your primary objective is that you're trying to [00:22:00] aim for, Facebook is, in my opinion, the best platform for identifying that and making it happen additionally.
Yes. And that includes even better than YouTube and et cetera, et cetera. In terms of the algorithm doing the work for you, right? You press a couple buttons, Facebook will make adjustments for you even when you're a knucklehead and you make mistakes. Additionally, Facebook ad creative is unbelievably easy to create.
It's, you can use a stock image in a couple of words, and you have a, you have an ad creative, not the same deal at all. For say, for example, YouTube. Or TikTok or et cetera. So you have this very easy [00:22:30] platform and you had people who got really good at it. And these are the media buyers.
These are the founders of these media buying agencies. They got very good at it. They got good at it when it was incredibly easy to do okay, and not to discount anybody. I'm not saying that, their skills aren't worthwhile or anything like that, but they got good at it In the Gold Rush era where it was cheap, there was very little competition and it was very easy to do.
Then what do they do? Like any good person who is successful at something, they want to grow to the next level, and so they appoint themselves the [00:23:00] CEO and they start hiring what they call junior media buyers. If you're familiar with hiring theory, these are people who are lower on the S curve, which is to say.
They may have enthusiasm, but they don't have skill. Therefore, they're very inexpensive to hire these founding media buyers. Now, CEOs did this because they need margin within their offers so that they can make money as well. This is where the problems really started. The problems start here because first off, the people who are actually handling the client's accounts are juniors.
People who don't know much of anything. And then the second problem [00:23:30] is the people who are good at media buying don't necessarily make good CEOs. These are two very different skill sets. You can be. You can be technically proficient at a thing and be a horrible leader. You can be a horrible trainer. You can be a horrible teacher, and a lot of media buying agencies have this problem where you have people who don't know what they're doing.
The juniors being run by people who don't know how to run people. And that is a lot of the media buying industry you'll see it in especially for example, you may hire a [00:24:00] media buying agency because you followed this guru for a very long time and the guru has been teaching all of his stuff and like just very impressed by his person.
You hire the agency and you get really bad results. And you say, what the heck's going on? It's because the guru wasn't running your account. The junior was okay. And the guru hasn't yet set in systems and developed their people enough to be able to actually replicate what the guru can replicate. It doesn't mean the guru's bad at what they do or that they can't run ads.
It's just that the company and the systems themselves are broken. So you get caught in this trap that was media buying. It's always been media buying, but that, [00:24:30] that problem got exacerbated this last year and a half when Facebook just went Bezos. And they lost their minds when iOS 14 rolled out, when they were getting investigated and all this kind of stuff.
And Facebook had, it was a very tumultuous time in the ad platform's history. And what that meant is you had frontline workers, juniors who really didn't know what they were talking about, and then CEOs of media buying agencies who were so disconnected from the day to day that they also didn't know what they were talking about.
And a lot of people this past [00:25:00] year and a half, two years have gotten caught up in that sort of perfect storm. If you yourself have experienced diminishing ad returns, it might be your agency might not actually be your stuff. I would say more people are turning offers off because of their agency than because the offer is actually dead.
I don't think people understand how long offers can go if you just refresh creative. You can run offers for a long time. Years and years and years. You just gotta keep refreshing, creative, try new things, but it's not the quote unquote the platform. [00:25:30] And I'll give you an example.
We hired somebody, we gave it one last try. We hired who everyone said was the best of the best. And again, the guru at the top was the best of the best. We wanted them to run a hundred thousand dollars a month just as a test. They started running it. They took our cost per sale from $40 a book to $140 a book.
And what did they do? They said it's the platform. We let 'em go for seven weeks. And then we fired him. We took it over. Within 24 hours, we got it back down to $40 cost per sale. So you have to be careful with all this stuff going on. Again, I'm not against media [00:26:00] buying agencies. I'm sure there's some agency out there that's wonderful and amazing.
The four that we hired this last year weren't, but what I am, it is important for you to understand that when you're hiring a media buying agency, it's a very tumultuous time to be an agency right now. And there are a lot of things stacked against agencies. The business model. The difference between CEO and technical practitioner and then platform volatility.
Right now a lot of agencies are trying to jump into multiple platforms. What does that mean? It means everyone's learning something new. So they say, we're good at this, and [00:26:30] this, but you don't know that you might actually be the first account they're trying this stuff on. Okay? Again, I'm not trying to diminish the media buying agency world or anything, but you have to.
None of this is reason to not work with media buying agencies, but if you go into it blind. That's really dangerous and that we did go into a blind, because remember I told you last time I opened a business for the first time was 2015. It was a different landscape for media buyers. Then I came into a different landscape to media buyers and we don't we haven't used media buyers [00:27:00] before that, right?
This is like something that we reentered into, and so this is like a rediscovery of the media buying agency. So from what we learned this year, that's what's going on. You do with that, what you will in terms of information. What we have decided to do is to bring everything in house. On this business just as, which is what we've done for all of our other businesses.
A big reason that we have brought it in-house is not necessarily because we tried four agencies and they didn't work. I have no problem continuing to try until something works, but because we realized how [00:27:30] tumultuous traffic is right now, agencies are jumping from platform to platform. Some agencies are struggling to keep their their, for example, their business accounts, account managers open, things like that.
And there's just a lot of operational chaos. Going on in agencies, and I don't want to have to pay for that. I don't wanna pay someone else for them to figure it out. Okay. And not only do I not wanna pay for it, but all organizations are slow to move. So if I'm a client in an agency that's well [00:28:00] staffed, meaning there's lots of people involved and there's juniors and seniors and project managers and things like that, to affect change in an organization like that is slow.
Somebody has to be in charge of development of new strategies. Those new strategies that need to be passed on to the next person, then implemented, then trained, then experimentation, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you bring it in-house, we can do that same thing in three days, right?
If we just have one person running our ads, we have somebody who's Hey, I figured this thing out. Can you do it? Yeah, I'm doing it done. We don't have to wait for team [00:28:30] approvals and team meetings and all this kind of stuff. So we're bringing in-house for operational efficiency. Which in and of itself will reduce the overall cost to us for media.
Okay. We are going multi-platform. We already are multi-platform. We would've been multi-platform a long time ago, except we use media buyers instead of just doing it ourselves. For those of you who are really in the beginning stages of running ads and things like that, it's uncomfortable and it's not terribly, it's not the dream picture perfect entrepreneurial life, [00:29:00] but I would recommend.
Learning ads yourself as best as you can, even if you plan to outsource it as quickly as possible, just so you know what's going on. One of the interesting things about this past year was watching all of the media buyers in defending their poor performance, thinking that we didn't know what we were talking about.
So on the surface, we look like a 1-year-old company, right? Shoot. When we hired our first people, I think we were only like a two month old company, but I've been doing this since 2007. The team that I brought along with me has been with me since [00:29:30] 2014, so we knew significantly more than I think any of the media buyer agencies knew that we knew.
And it was really interesting to see how they spoke to us in defending their lack of results. And I just thought about all the new, all the actually new business owners out there that are probably buying from these people. And again, I don't think these people are trying to be evil or anything like that.
They're in a tough situation. Everything I said is true. It's tumultuous. They're working with juniors. They probably aren't that good of a CEO, so of course, they've gotta defend themselves. How else are they [00:30:00] gonna keep bread on the table? And, all that kinda stuff. Just as a sort of word of warning, again, not that you don't need to buy media agencies, but go in with eyes wide open.
Have at least a minimum understanding of how the whole thing works, just so that you don't get pushed around. Okay. 'cause desperate times, call for desperate measures and all that kinda good stuff. And I think media buying in the past year or two has been in something of a desperate. Sort of situation.
At least that's what we noticed as compared to 2015. Okay. Oh, and then the last thing, by the way, just as a general note, if you've noticed that all of your [00:30:30] stuff has just stopped working all of a sudden and you're using a media buying agency, I would look there first. Like I said, we've, we're in this like weird bubble 'cause we internally do all of our stuff.
Everyone always talks about how ads aren't working anymore and the iOS 14 broke everything and all this kinda stuff. We never see that. Like whenever people are saying Sky is falling, we look hard at our numbers and we just, we just don't see it. And again, I think it's just part of that cycle, the internet marketing cycle, the cycle of the business model of media buying agencies, people parroting what other people are saying without actually having access to [00:31:00] data.
So if you're stuck all of a sudden stopped working and you're using a media buying agency, I would look there first. If you aren't using a media buying agency and everything stopped working, you probably just need to refresh your creative. You probably overexposed your market to the same ads, to the same page, but that doesn't mean you overexposed the purchase power of your market.
Meaning, man, maybe 2 million people saw your ad, but a million of the people within your market would have bought, but they, so you just need to give 'em another look. Anyways, that's a little side note. Okay number, let's see. What are we, [00:31:30] number six. Having fun matters. It really matters, especially if you're running a book funnel.
I know it seems totally random and irrelevant. How is it tied specifically to book funnels? But think about what's happening when somebody reads a book. It's a very different interaction than a webinar. Or any other marketing strategy that you could use. There is an emotional component to book buying or to book buying, and then book reading.
So there's a difference between a reader and a customer, a reader, and a webinar attendee, a reader, and a group member. In your Facebook group, there's an emotional component. Pure audio book is 4, 5, [00:32:00] 6 hours long. People, human beings cannot help. The brain is wired to form an emotional attachment to the people and things that we spend a lot of time with.
Okay? So keep that in mind and imagine this scenario. You have read someone's book. You think the world of them now because they what? They changed your beliefs. They changed your thoughts about stuff. You have new ideas. Maybe they even had an exercise in the book and you did the exercise in the book, and now you've, you can see more possibilities and you accomplished something or you repaired a [00:32:30] relationship, whatever it is, and you're on this person's email list and all of a sudden they start treating you like you're garbage.
This is a very interesting relationship dynamic. You read this book. You care significantly about you. You really think highly of this person. 'cause you spent so much time in their head consuming their language, they did something for you. And now it's like you're talking to a machine who doesn't care about you as a person.
It's a, that is a great strategy [00:33:00] for shooting yourself in the knee. That is a great way to ruin your book funnel. Instead, if you're running a book funnel, you have to understand who these people are. That you're going to be marketing other offers to or other things to these are your friends. They have spent a significant amount of time building an emotional relationship with you.
You just weren't there for it. So you don't always feel it. But I'm telling you, if you start having fun in your marketing off the back of a book [00:33:30] funnel, what ends up happening is that you end up continuing the relationship that the book built for you. Which means that you're progressing and moving forward, you're moving that person through whatever it is that you're trying to move them through.
If you all of a sudden become a machine and try to either oversell or be overly aggressive or just be boring and mechanical and just another copycat marketer. Then what happens is you move the relationship backwards. So the book does all this work to [00:34:00] move someone towards you, and then you push them away.
It's all the weird things that people do in relationships. You have three amazing first dates, and then the fourth date they don't call you back or they start acting weird and you're like, what the heck is going on? It moves things backwards. So having fun isn't just a fun thing to do.
It's a good strategy. For keeping the momentum going off the back of a book funnel. All of the best emails and promotions and et cetera that we've ever done off the back of book [00:34:30] funnels were design and created with that in mind. And it doesn't matter if you're running books to incredibly sophisticated and wealthy and highly educated people that most people think are a little bit stuffy, right?
It doesn't matter if that's who your book audience is too. They're still human beings. And if you know your audience well. You know how that audience likes to have fun and nine times outta 10, it starts with you having fun, right? You can't go in and imagine you go to a party and you say to yourself, I'm gonna have fun.
And you memorize a bunch of jokes and then you stand in the middle of the party [00:35:00] like yelling out your jokes in a monotone voice. That doesn't work either. And it does have to be sincere, and you do have to enjoy it. And that leads me to the last thing that we learned this year. And this was a reiteration and just do it your own way.
Take everything I've just said and throw it out the window. If it doesn't jive with you there, there's no point, okay? There's no point in doing something just because somebody else did it. That is the dumbest thing to do in your business. If you wanna write a book and you want a book funnel to sell that book for [00:35:30] you, let's work together.
We can totally help you. If you don't wanna write a book and you don't wanna do a book funnel, don't buy anything from us. Don't go find something else that is more aligned with. What you want to do. When we started this business back in January of 2021, this new one that did 2 million or 2.2 million in the first 12 months when we started this and by the way, 2.2 million.
I'm so angry at the media buyers 'cause that should be closer to four, but that's another audio for another day. Although I will admit I've gone a little hard on media buyers. This audio, I do apologize. If you're a [00:36:00] media buyer, just help us revolutionize the the marketplace and stand out and be different and actually care about your people.
But this is this. $2.2 million in 12 months. Wow. That's wonderful and amazing. When we started back in January, like I do in every project I do, I always try to get as much advice as I possibly can. Consultants, coaches, et cetera. They were all saying no, you gotta do VSL, webinar, VSL, webinar, VSL, webinars.
Everybody was saying that's the best way to get on calls, high ticket. And I just, I didn't want to, I just didn't wanna do it. And so I did it this way instead. And I think you [00:36:30] can't underestimate. This fact, which is could A VSL or webinar funnel or lead magnet or LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, could other strategies have made me more money?
Maybe could other strategies have been more effective and efficient? Maybe could they have brought me higher profit margins or something? Yeah, maybe. Probably. I don't know. I don't know. I've never tried them. What I do know is that I wouldn't have done them. So for example is direct outreach.[00:37:00]
So sending dms to everybody all day, is that more profitable than writing a book funnel and running a book? Probably it probably actually is. I know there's a couple people who are doing high six, high seven figures off of zero ad spend. Is running an open Facebook group more profitable than a book funnel?
I don't know. Probably. I know lots of people doing really good numbers off of group funnels. That's wonderful. But I'm not gonna do a group funnel. I don't have time attention. I don't have the patience. I don't have the desire to do that. So I know that it's a useless [00:37:30] campaign or marketing strategy for me.
'cause I just don't wanna do it. I'm not gonna sit and send direct outreach messages all day. I'm not gonna do it. I can take all that time that I was gonna do that and just write a book put the book up, and then I forget about it. I've spent zero time on this book since it was launched in January of last year.
I like that so much more than what some other marketing method could have given me. And that, that, that is so important for you as a business owner to get in the habit of it. It's about learning how to make decisions [00:38:00] from within you rather than from the external advice that you're constantly consuming.
Because if you're, especially if you're an entrepreneur who keeps running around in circles, like you keep busting your butt and you are not making progress, I would bet all the pennies in my pocket, it's probably because. You are consistently using an incorrect decision framework. The decision framework you're currently using is what are other people doing?
What did that person say to do? What's working for them? And what you really should be doing is saying, what do I wanna do? What will be fun and easy for me to do? What will something that I can [00:38:30] consistently do over time? Because that is ridiculously more profitable than a theory that someday you might do something that you know deep inside you're probably not gonna do.
So you know it's have fun, all that kinda good stuff. But do it. Do it the way that you wanna do it. If you want to write a book and you want to do a book funnel, we can help you. Simple. Book a call, peacefulprofits.com/call. Is that simple? If you want to do VSLs, if you wanna do something else, [00:39:00] these are the things that you have to decide, and when you do decide them, then you will make a significant amount of progress.
Because it's all about consistency and that's why I like book funnels. I write a book once and then I don't have to deal with it again. So I don't really do Facebook groups because you have to constantly be like nurturing it and all that kinda stuff. It's just not really my thing. But knowing that about yourself, maybe that is your thing.
I have someone on my team, she just came on in the past six months. She loves, she genuinely loves talking [00:39:30] to everybody about everything. That's amazing. Like in awe, she probably should do a group funnel. When she grows her business because that's, that's a big part of, anyways running in circles here on this one.
But it's, I wish there was a different way I could tell you how important it's, other than it's incredibly important. Alright, so last little bit of this audio, leave you with our goals for 2022. On this particular book in the funnel this particular business really the systems, the team, the offers, the backend, that's all kind of dialed in.
Like I said, [00:40:00] we do about $183 in lifetime value just in the first year. So you figure at least six months of this last year hasn't even. Met it out the entire lifetime value. But we wanna look at getting that 180 3 per book buyer closer to 2 25, 2 50. That's the number we like to play with.
That gets us up into the fives and sixes in terms of return on ad spend, which for us. And in my experience, anything between four and six X ROAS is really where you need to be of scale is your goal. Meaning you wanna work yourself outta the business. So you need to hire people, you want decent profit [00:40:30] margins, you'll be able to pay your taxes and all that kind of good stuff.
So between four and six x ro we have it now technically, but again I think we're gonna work on some stuff like that. What are we gonna do? We're just gonna add more offers. More opportunities to help people that higher and higher price points, and that's how we'll take care of that.
So it should be relatively easy. It should be fun. We'll put together some offers that we can offer people that they'll enjoy. Next is we. Again I'm so disappointed in having only sold 32 books a day last year. That's just not even close to anything interesting to me, in terms of what we normally do.
So that sounded like a diva [00:41:00] but three, two books a day for us, that's definitely under performance, that I, I see that. I saw that and it was just like, I can't believe that's all we did last year. What we are doing now is about 150. I'd like by the end of Q1 to be at about 200 books a day, holding strong and steady, a good system of refreshing, creative so we can keep this thing going for years.
Books of all the different types of campaigns you can run. Book funnels tend to have the longest shelf life. For example, dot com. Secrets from Russell Brunson's been going on, I think since 20 15, 20 [00:41:30] 16, and I think the last I heard he sold about 225,000 copies, 250,000 copies of his book. Internet marketing, there's a lot of money to be made in internet marketing, but you have to understand it's a very small market compared to say, health, which, so just to give you some perspective, relationships, general wealth, finances, things, that's a little bit more broad market.
You can sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies of your book before it, ever actually quote unquote oversaturate the market. So that's just to give you some perspective, that's why I look at 32 books a day over a year, eh? [00:42:00] I would've liked a lot more. And we're gonna hit that this year.
We'll probably do about 150 to 200 books a day off of this one. That is normally what I would expect is a good sort of base performance for book funnels, a hundred, 150, 200 books a day. Okay. Next we have I'd like to launch four more books for this particular brand this year. It's a very enjoyable brand.
This particular business that we've done it's very, like I said, saturated, very jaded. So what I'd like to do is when I write books, I think about my dream buyer, and then I think about the [00:42:30] books that dream buyer would buy. And then I look at each book funnel as a potential entry into this person's life.
So maybe they don't, and maybe they don't like that particular book that I wrote. But they would love another book that's on a kind of different topic. So for example, maybe I wrote a book, this isn't the actual business, but maybe I wrote a book about growing apple trees and this dream buyer of mine didn't buy it last year.
They probably never would buy that particular book, but maybe they would buy a book on soil production and how to create soil. If [00:43:00] I'm selling something to do with farming on the back end, the apple, how to grow Apple trees, apple Farm, whatever, and the Soil book, they both lead into that core offer. But I'm able to basically sweep more of that market by having multiple books.
Additionally, we know from basic psychology, the more time you spend with somebody, the more you love and trust them. It's a filial imprinting or Philly imprinting. I don't actually know the spelling of it. What's the quote? Don't ever judge somebody who doesn't know how to pronounce the word, because they might have learned it while they [00:43:30] were reading.
There's a little joke there for you. B. The little cheesy joke I admit, but it's one of my favorites. The the other way to think about books is that one book that person sits down and listens to you for say, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hours, if it's an audio book or they read it for 3, 4, 5 hours, if I can get them two or three other books that they would buy and they're, 3, 4, 5 hours each, let's say I've got four books, five hours long each, that's 20 hours, they would've spent listening to my ideas and me, doing things like changing their beliefs and showing them new things and things like that, helping them along the way.
Every hour they spend increases [00:44:00] their likelihood of buying something else from me, right? So it's one of those things where it's a, in some ways, what you might call a volume play in the sense that more is, in fact more, somebody who reads one book from you isn't as convinced as somebody who read four books from you.
So multiple books and multiple book funnels allows you to penetrate more of the market, but it also allows you to take those people who cross by and move them further along the process. Of becoming, whatever, a core client of yours or whatever it's you're trying to [00:44:30] do. Okay. And the last thing that we have scheduled for 2022 is actually something that's gonna happen this February 1st, which is I will be exiting all of my companies.
Now exiting might not be the right word. I might be getting ahead of myself. I might just be so excited that I might be using a word that sounds bigger than it actually is. But essentially I will be out of all of my companies and I will work one day a week for two hours a day. It's taken many years for us to get to this point.
And I've had to assemble an absolutely incredible team of, and that was very hard in and of [00:45:00] itself. But by February 1st of this year, I'm recording this in 2022, I will be out of my companies still a part of the company in the sense that basically once a week I'll meet with my leadership teams and that's it.
And then the rest of the week I'm out. I'm not gonna be in comms channels, I'm not gonna be checking Facebook's or doing anything like that. That's very exciting. And I mentioned that because I'm able to do that because of the book funnel, right? It, like what we were talking about earlier I'm not gonna do organic outreach.
I'm not gonna do a bunch of social media posting. I'm not gonna engage in [00:45:30] activities that contradict what I'm trying to do with my life. A book, you write it once, set it in a funnel. There are people that can take that funnel and get it out into the world. We found this year, it wasn't media buyers who were media buying agencies who were able to do that, but there are still people, there's internal people that were hiring and training and things like that.
But it is, once you build the asset can perform in lieu of you needing to perform for it. Does that make sense? So I, my marketing is, and a lot of my selling. Is done without me having [00:46:00] to be a part of it at all. At all. And then of course we have a sales team which kind of wraps up that closure and then we have fulfillment teams and et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I'll do a podcast a little bit later about how we set that all up, but that's what we're doing in 2022. So in, I dunno, two, three weeks, I'll write off into kind of quasi retirement. I don't know what I'm gonna be doing next. Maybe I'll just make more podcast episodes like this. I dunno. But. Wanted to share with you at least a glimpse and a picture into the possibilities behind a book funnel.
They're wonderful. They're fantastic. Writing a book is a joyful experience for yourself. [00:46:30] And if you do it right, it can be an incredible way to grow your business. If you would like help from my people, my team. To I help you write your book, grow your book, get your business ready for a book funnel, like some of the things we talked about today.
Then just go to peacefulprofits.com/call. We'd love to have a chat with you. Otherwise, I hope that you enjoyed this podcast episode. You might be seeing it on the YouTubes or anywhere else. If you do, please. Leave a comment, share it like it if you want. We really don't have any intentions behind these other than just to share the information as we find it.
And then for those who are interested to come work with us, [00:47:00] otherwise, we love sharing this kind of stuff. We'd love to know what else you want to hear from us, and we'll talk to you later. Hope you have a wonderful day.