Want to Make More Money? Then Stop Overcomplicating Things.

I think we overcomplicate things a lot of the time.🤔

Case in point:

I recently decided to revamp an old offer of mine. This is something that last received traffic in 2017, and it's been sitting dormant ever since.

The offer was pretty solid back in the day, not one of my biggest or most well-known offers, but always decent on the conversion front… 💲

Which meant I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.

So, instead I got on forums and read the stories of people who suffer from the health challenge the offer/product addresses (took me about two hours). 🕘

One of the posts in particular stood out to me, and I thought it was a compelling story idea.

So then I simply rewrote the lead and the background story of the sales letter, based on what I found on the forums (took me about two hours).

I came up with a new headline (took me about 30 minutes).

And finally, I went through the second half of the sales letter and just made little tweaks to make sure it was congruent with the new lead + story (took me about 1 hour).

Total all of this took me about 5 ½ hours…

Then, my friend who I decided to partner with on the offer got the “new” sales letter into production…

With a new design, new labels, fulfillment integration, etc.

That took about two weeks…

And we launched the “new” offer on Thursday to some internal lists we manage.

The stats looked really good… like 7% on his list which is super warm, and between 4-6% on some of the lists I control which are less well managed.

So we gave it to some of our other friends and affiliate partners to send…

And for them, it’s converting at well over 3% on average…

Plus, we got someone we work with to start running it on Facebook…

Where it’s also converting at over 3% so far.

And, what really blows my mind about all of this…

Is how “easy” everything has been.

• Less than 6 hours to write new copy…
• Less than 2 weeks in production…
• Already netted us a strong 5 figures…
• And will undoubtedly net us each at least $250k profit in the next few months… possibly even a few million each, depending on how much we scale the offer and how long we run it for.

Now this really, truly isn’t a “brag post.” Because yeah, I’m happy with how this has gone, but that’s not the point.

Here are the takeaways as I see them:

1. How many old offers do you have sitting around right now that are “dead?” My wager is that they aren’t actually dead. They just need some TLC. Slap a new headline, a new lead, and a new background story on those “dead” offers and watch them rise like Lazarus.
2. We often give up on offers too fast. We take something live, it doesn’t hit, and we say “damn on to the next one.” That’s a shitty model. What we should be saying is: “okay, we need a new lead to test.”
3. Speaking of leads – this is why I advocate for copywriters providing their clients with multiple versions of a lead, and not asking for more money to do it. If you love the first lead you wrote, that’s fine. But I always communicate with my clients and let them know that if for some reason what I’ve written for them doesn’t work, the FIRST thing we’re going to do is test out some new leads, which I’ll write for them.

A good case in point on this is one of my clients who has a weight loss offer.

He’s always struggled to get it working on cold.

The first lead I wrote for them did okay.

The second one I wrote for them converted at 0.40% better.

That’s significant. And I just wrote another lead for them (very different style), that I’m hoping will boost conversions even more.

Why?

I want him scaling the crap out of this offer on cold traffic, so he hires me for every single additional product he has in the future (if I decide I have the availability to work on those offers, I might not even want to, but I want that optionality in my life).

1. This is something broader, but I’ve been reminded of it lately. A good offer is like pornography: you know it when you see it. Maybe not pre-testing, but by the time you test a good offer, and the metrics and conversions keep coming back strong every time, you know the offer is good.

The reason this is important is simple, a lot of us have at least a handful of offers that are “okay.”

But instead of focusing on reworking the copy (the headline, the lead, the story, or whatever) we keep trying to make on-page optimization tweaks, keep testing different button colors, and keep trying to get people to send traffic through flattery, bribery, or flat-out begging.

We think that’s easier than rewriting or reworking the offer, but it’s not.

It’s exhausting and draining, especially when compared to the alternative, which is that:

You spend 6 hours writing copy and that “okay” offer you’ve been trying to scale for a year suddenly becomes a “killer” offer that people are begging you to run, and that grosses you millions of dollars at a minimum.

It’s one of the best ROIs on your time on Earth.

1. There’s a reason why having experience is so important. In 2015, it would have taken me three months to launch a new offer, and I would have made tons of mistakes as I was doing it. In 2019, I launched a new offer in 2.5 weeks and am already making a bunch of money from it. Plus, given all of my experience, I’m pretty confident we won't make any major mistakes here either.
2. And a personal network is really important, too. Because it’s nice to know that once I have an offer that’s been tested internally, I can give it to people I know and they’ll send traffic to it right away. They do that because we have a long history together, plus they know about my track-record and history. But, the takeaway on this one is working hard to build up your own network, so that you have similar options whenever you launch something.
3. Don’t overcomplicate things. Yes, I’m including this one so I can put a nice little “bow” on this post and finish it the way it began. But it’s also so true. We don’t need to be constantly searching for the next pot of gold at the end of the next rainbow. Often we have a whole cave of gold sitting on our computer hard drives. And we just need to pull out a few of those gold nuggets, give them a nice shining, and they’ll be as good as new.

Honestly there are a ton more takeaways than the ones I listed. But those are a good start.

Hope you guys find this interesting and useful….

 

– SPG.

P.S. This post originally came from an email I sent to my private list. If you want to see more stuff like this from me, you can apply to join my list using this link.