Grow Your Audience with Rachel Miller

In This Episode

• [01:12] – Stephan interviews Rachel Miller, a former teacher turned work-from-home mom, who created a viral website, built multiple audiences and launched a coaching program with a far-reaching impact.
• [09:29] – Rachel shares a technique for building audiences and suggests using the “bumper sticker effect.” She explains why Facebook is still a great platform for building a community.
• [12:58] – Rachel discusses Facebook advertising, including strategies that no longer work.
• [16:56] – Rachel gives an example of using organic means to build an audience and advertising without spending money on ads.
• [22:46] – How much does it mean to celebrate your audience?
• [27:18] – Rachel explains how valuable it is to find the right content for your niche.
• [34:03] – Rachel discusses a complementary tool that increases value for the audience and improves the relationship with the other company.
• [36:52] – Rachel describes their nature campaign sequence.
• [40:31] – Rachel reveals the most effective or popular campaigns to promote.

Jump to Links and Resources

Rachel, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me today, Stephan.

Well, it’s great to have you, and I’d love to start with your origin story of how you got into this business and built up quite a reputation as an online marketer.

Thank you. How many of you guys have heard the story about the bear chasing the man, and you take action when a bear is chasing you? If no bear is chasing you, you sit on your laurels, chill out for a bit, and weigh your options. If I’m going on a hike, I could decide maybe I’ll take this road or that road. Should I pack something? But if a bear is chasing me on the trail, I’m booking it.

I was a school teacher. I love teaching, absolutely love it. I loved being in the classroom. I taught government economics to high schoolers and seniors. While teaching high schoolers, I got pregnant with my first kid, and I was so excited. I went on maternity leave. While on maternity leave, I got pregnant with my second child that fast. Whenever I’m pregnant, I’m sick. I knew I couldn’t be pregnant, have a newborn, and be a schoolteacher. That would be hard for me.

In addition, how do I now, when I have the baby, pay for two infants to be in childcare on a three-year teacher salary? That’s just not possible. What I needed to do, was I needed to find work from home, and I had this bear chasing me. This bear was on my tail. The bear on my tail was I couldn’t financially support my children and the lifestyle that I wanted. I would walk outside, my car had broken down two weeks after I had quit my teaching job, but I felt like I’d been fired. I wasn’t fired, but I felt like it.

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I would walk by my car, and it had a broken transmission. It was a $600 payment to fix the car. I didn’t have $600 at the time. That’s when I was like, “We need to do something else with our lives. I don’t want to be in this spot where I have to nickel and dime everything. I don’t want to be in this place anymore.” There’s a bear chasing me, I start a website, and I’m just starting just to connect with other people. As I’m starting the website, it grew, and it grew. Before I knew it, I had three books that I’d written for that website.

We were bringing in 10 million page views a month to that website. I think we had a million and something fans on that Facebook page, not including the 600,000 on Pinterest, not including the 100,000 on Instagram and all the other places. Anyway, my point is, I’ve grown all these audiences. These audiences were extremely lucrative and productive for me and my business. It happened slowly, looking back, but at the same time, it was fast because I had that bear chasing me. I had to get up and run after the thing that I needed. For us, that was revenue.

That was about 15 years ago. I began starting viral websites. I built one, and I built another one, and I built a third one. Then people started asking me, “how are you building these viral websites?” One. “How do you grow the audience that sends traffic to the viral website?” Two. Then three, “how are you making money off these virals?” Because I know people who’ve gone viral, and they couldn’t sell a single t-shirt from their virals. “What did you do that meant that you got to harness that traffic and make them into sales?”

That’s how I started a coaching program. So far, in the past five years, I did the math, and we’ve coached over 28,000 people that have paid me to be part of any of my programs. I’m super blessed, and I’m super grateful for getting to make a bigger impact. I got to make a bigger impact on the four or five million people following my audience. But having the audiences of my coaching stuff, I’ve impacted untold numbers of people. That’s what I think my biggest joy has been.

My biggest joy is having an impact on a number of people from my coaching program.

That’s pretty cool. That’s a great story. If you can build such amazing audiences on your own, why would you want to teach others to do it? Couldn’t you make quite a lot more money doing that audience building and funnel building and all that stuff for yourself and not teach others to make millions?

Yes, I could see why people would say that. But I looked at my audience. One of my audiences is crazy cat ladies, and I have 135,000 crazy cat ladies that follow me. I looked at those crazy cat ladies, and they’re following six other crazy cat lady websites. It’s not limiting my reach, and it’s not limiting my sales. All I get to do is magnify my impact. 

Now, instead of being one of the crazy cat ladies sites that they follow, I get to be one of those sites, but I also get to impact the three, five, or six other people they’re also following. Now, our impact is even bigger in that person’s life.

I see it as multiplying, not limiting, whenever I train my competition, which I train my competition all the time.

Yeah, that’s a good way to be in the world, I think. What is it about crazy cat ladies that—what brings you to that community?

Well, as a marketer, I made the logical step. My neighbor’s cat was peeing on my lawn furniture in my back garden around my pool, which was very pleasant. You’re swimming, and there is the cat. I did what all marketers that are sane do when there’s a cat that annoys them.

Instead of talking directly to my neighbor, I made a funny page about the cat, and then the cat went viral. I’m like, well, I guess a lot of people like me are making fun of this cat. Then I started profiting off that page. Eventually, Justice went away, Titus or Justice. I can’t remember the name of the cat.

Did he go away to heaven, or he moved away or what?

The neighbor couldn’t find the cat anymore. I’m assuming that the cat—the cat probably went to somebody else’s house, and they either—who knows what happened, but he was no longer bothering me. But in the process of having that cat bless our home, I’m not a cat person, but I just made fun of a cat and decided to do it on Facebook Live. It went crazy, but people following me loved this cat and the experience.

I didn’t do it in a mean way, does that make sense? I did it in, like, “let’s celebrate this cat.” I called it the Crazy Cat Lady page, making fun of it a little bit, maybe, my neighbor and the cat relationship, but at the same time, I attracted many people who loved their cats and wanted to express their relationship with the cat. Then I started marketing to them because that’s what you do when you’re a marketer.

That’s funny. What are you doing these days in terms of the cat community?

I got mad at my cat audience. The cat audience was a joke. I didn’t start it as a real thing. I was just giving that as an example. I probably have 40 different audiences that I have built over the years. Of the 40 different audiences, most of them I started on a whim. They may not be the ones that fill my bucket, my heart. They’re just ones that I happen to have. The cat one was one that I happened to have. Eventually, the audience kind of irritated me. There was a long story where I posted about the cat fighting with one of my kids about a toy, and the audience just really preferred the cat to my child, and I just had a hard time with it, so I stepped out of that audience a little bit.

I tried to sell it once or twice, but my brother said he wanted it. I said I’m not going to sell it, I was going to give it to my brother, and then my brother didn’t want it. The cat audience is just there right now. What am I doing? I build software companies. I have six different companies that I run. I run some of them for myself, as in I built audiences where I just drive traffic to my offers, and I benefit from that. We stacked out a carwash, and we have apartment complexes, I make sure they’re filled with residents. I’ve got multiple different businesses that I use my traffic for, in addition to viral websites and coaching programs.

I built audiences where I drive traffic to my offers, and I benefit from that.

In addition to that, I train people how to build their audiences, and I have a software company that provides digital assets that people can use to grow their audiences and sell to their audiences without any effort.

Let’s go through some of that because I’d love for our audience, our listeners, to learn some of the techniques that you’re teaching to your students around building audiences.

One of the tactics we teach people to do is to know what their audience wants to say about themselves as more important than the pain point that that person has. A lot of times when we’re coaches or when we’re marketers, we think, what is this person’s pain? I’m going to put my finger on it and push on it and amplify it and make this pain even bigger to the person, and then they’ll buy my solution. Without realizing that when we do that, what we’re usually doing is pushing our audience away.

We’re saying to them, I’m going to boss you. I’m going to put you down. You’re not good enough. That’s never the feeling I want my people to have. I want my people to feel loved. I want my people to trust me. I want my people to connect with me before they ever hear that I can solve a pain point that they have. Before they ever think that I’m an expert in anything, I want them to feel like the heroes of their lives. I love to call it the “bumper sticker effect”, which is how you can identify what your person most calls themselves.

What would they put on a bumper sticker? What would they wear on a t-shirt? What would they use as a hashtag to describe themselves? What Facebook groups would they say I am a—and I’m part of this community? When you can identify that, ask that person if you’re a spud lover. That’s kind of an unusual thing. It’s a person who is obsessed with potatoes. Well, what would you buy in addition to being a spud lover? There’s a whole diet program where there’s a coaching program that we can get on where you eat nothing but potatoes, and you lose all of this weight. That’s amazing. Let’s get on our coaching program, and I’ll be your weight loss coach. I love spuds, which we would’ve never gotten to from potatoes.

Sometimes, you can find the most interesting connections. It starts not by saying I’m going to solve your pain but starts by who my person is and what is the thing that they most want the world to know about who they are.

Do you find that Facebook is one of the best places to build a community, or has that kind of jumped the shark?

Right now, the majority of people are still on Facebook. They’re still opening Facebook. They’re still engaging in Facebook content. Last ten days ago, we got one of our clients to 1.7 million people with zero ad spend on a post on their business page with no ads. It’s still going viral. It’s still the place. It’s better to me than TikTok doesn’t—how do I say it? A person doesn’t invest in you with the same amount of attention and engagement on TikTok as they do on Facebook.

I convert on TikTok, and the ads are cheaper, but my leads are lower quality.

I mean that they might follow you on TikTok, but you have to nurture them—I find that they tend to buy books with low-ticket products. Still, converting them into a high ticket offer, I do that much better on Facebook, where I can connect with them in Facebook Messenger, a Facebook group, and Instagram, which is also Facebook. The content of Facebook and Instagram is the same feed on the back end. I can connect with someone more deeply using the Facebook network than any other platform. Yes, I am still on TikTok. I still have people there. I convert on TikTok, and the ads are cheaper, but my leads are lower quality, and I prefer them on Facebook because of all the tools I have there.

Got you. What are some of the techniques that used to work but are no longer on Facebook?

Well, one thing that people have done was ads with cold audiences using interests. I find those aren’t converting as well, but for my systems, I’ve always taught people to build their audience. You go onto Facebook, put content that your people engage with and build your audience using the Facebook platform. When you do that, you’re able to build a look-alike on that, and you’re able to retarget. It still works. I haven’t seen much of a decline in the way Facebook has worked. Some live launches come and go, but the majority of the tactics I have taught they’re still the same tactics even three or four years later.

Are you spending money on Facebook ads?

Yeah, we spend about $3000 to $10,000 a week.

A week, okay. Is that for just your businesses, or are you managing ad spending for clients?

I only manage my ad spend. However, it’s across six different businesses.

Got it.

We do the majority of our traffic through organic. While that is ad spend, it’s for conversions. We collect the audience using organic means and a couple of dollars in boosts, but then the majority of my ad spend is bent on retargeting that audience and getting them into conversion. Right now, our leads are about $2 a lead.

Okay. If you’re spending $2 a lead, you must be making more off of them than that. Are they thousands of dollars worth of value per lead or hundreds? What kind of return on ad spend or organic spend are you receiving?

My ROAS varies between 2x and 8x. It depends on the business, and frankly, it depends on the week. In the middle of December, it’s going to be lower than. Right now, it’s going to be a lot higher. It varies depending on—there are a lot of factors. I can’t just give one number, unfortunately.

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Got it. But what would be some of the factors that come into play?

You have to think of how Facebook is like a menu. There are different ups and downs in the Facebook marketplace. When is the menu more full? That would be a time when companies are coming in to sell. Before any holiday weekends, before Q4. At the end of any quarter, there’s usually an increase in ads. At the beginning of any quarter, ads go down. Right now, we’re getting towards the end of a quarter, so it’s a little higher, but give it three weeks, and it will be lower again, so we’ll be able to have a better return on that ad at that time.

It depends on what Facebook has as a newsfeed being delivered in ads. It also depends on our cycle. Let’s say, like one of my businesses, and people want debt relief. Right now, with the whole crypto issues and the whole SPG bank issues, that’s a hot topic; that ad is being depressed right now, so you’re going to have to pay more for those ads than you would for some other topics. It also depends on themes going on in the world too.

Right. Have you found that the return on ad spend has been declining over time?

Right now, our return on ad spend, because we’re now in Q1, is higher. Usually, in Q4, it goes down, and in Q1, it goes back up because fewer people are competing for ads.

Because some of the folks I talk to who spend a lot of money on Facebook ads say that it’s getting more and more expensive as each year goes on to participate in Facebook advertising, and we’re looking at other channels. Is that what you’re finding?

I find that’s true if you have to market for your cold audience. I don’t find that’s true if you build your warm audience using organic means.

Could we get an example of a client of yours who, let’s say, in the business-to-business world, maybe a services company that’s building up their audience and then advertising to that audience and doing well with it?

For example, service-based business, I’ll bring up my service, but software as a service business. What I’m doing right now is I’m building an AI machine that will build someone’s digital product, their sales page, their emails, their ads and what I’m doing is creating social media content that’s organic, and I’m going out there posting the content. I might boost it for $1 or $5 daily per post, and I’m collecting an audience. Right now, we have about 250,000 people in that audience. I’ve already tested this offer. I’ve done this without a single ad being spent because I’ve collected the audience other than boost.

I’ve done a boost where I’ve just had nurture gives. There’s no call to action, and there’s no sales page. Nothing is being given to my customers yet. I got a tiny subset of them, about 180 people, and I tested with that audience of 180 people, and I boosted to just that audience, get on a call with me, and I’ll show what I built. Thirty-seven of them got on the call. Of that 37, we sold 149 seats into the software. I discounted the software heavily, and the software access was $243 for a year for those people.

Of the 37 people, I sold 149 seats for the product. Of the people that showed up on the call, they told their friends four times as many applied. Organic means, and I didn’t spend a single penny on ads for that, other than boosting to build that initial audience. We’re not ready for a launch, but that product is coming. You all get to watch it if you want to, but that’s an example of organic means working better, so I don’t have to worry about ROAS because I’ve got an organic audience. Most people I coach come to me for organic marketing, not paid traffic.

When you have an organic audience, Facebook doesn’t need to wonder to whom they will drive traffic.

But paid traffic is built on organic. When you have an organic audience, Facebook doesn’t need to wonder, who are we going to drive traffic to? Facebook doesn’t have to say who is best for this content. They don’t have to say we need 1000 people who’ve purchased. They can look at our engagement, and then we can have sifting metrics that we layer on top. They can say, this is exactly who we’re going to drive this traffic to. It’s really fun to see it convert.

What would be some of the metrics that you’re honing in on with your audience? Let’s say it’s a percentage of the videos viewed and that sort of thing.

I usually want them to be someone who’s watched a percentage of my videos, but I want them to watch it multiple times, so they have to watch more than three videos, more than 75%. They have to have messaged or otherwise engaged with my page. They have to message my page or message me in a group, message me over email. I get them where they’re not only somebody who’s visited me but also listened to my content. Now, when I come to them and say, “hey, I’ve got an offer,” I have a very hot audience to give that offer to.

To the point where they’ll even go out and give the sales page link and get other people to buy it without me having to ask them to do that.

How do you let Facebook know that they’ve sent you an email?

We do have a list that we grow. Whenever they join my Facebook group, my Facebook group connects to my page. Whenever they message my page, they get an automated message and say, “Hey, do you want to join my Facebook group too?” Whenever they join my page, they comment on my page, my page is connected to my group, so it also says, you’re in the Facebook group. Do you want to join the Facebook group? Just because they engage on my page.

I always want to keep my page engagement high. Once they’ve engaged on my page, they get on my list generally and generally, they’ve got an invite to my Facebook Group. From there, in my Facebook group, I’ve got them engaging on my page, email list, and group. If they’re active on all three, they haven’t unfollowed my page, they haven’t left my email list, they haven’t hidden my Facebook group, and they’re one of my engaged people IN MY Facebook group, well, then I know they’re hot. I can tell Facebook, here are the 5000 people that are super-hot. Go find more people just like this. It’s really easy for me to grow.

Got it. How big is your email list?

We have about 100,000, but we call pretty heavily. I think about 80,000 of them are marketable. We have about 20,000 that are on my list, but they’re not marketable, as in I’ve banned them, and I don’t want to lose their email because then I can’t ban them, those kinds of things. Generally, my marketable list is about 80,000. We don’t usually like to go over 100,000. We want to keep our hot one. 

We have another list where we have our cold people, and I take that list, and I’ll create ads to remarket to them, but they’re my cold list. I don’t ever send emails to my cold list. I just have them in a spreadsheet somewhere.

All right. You have a list of email addresses you upload to Facebook so that it will build lookalike audiences on those.

With my cold list, I don’t necessarily want to make an email list for a lookalike for that. What I use that for is to remarket.

I send an ad to everybody based on their birthday, and it’s one of our ads that tends to re-engage our audience quickly.

It’s customized.  

Remarket. Because I want them to come back in and be hot. Just because they were on my email list nine months ago doesn’t mean they don’t want me now. I’ll send them ads now and then. I send them a birthday ad, saying happy birthday to them. I do a couple of different things to re-engage them. If they want to become re-engaged, they move on to my warm list, but I don’t make a lookalike audience based on them unless they spend a lot of money with me.

I’ve not heard of a birthday ad.

It’s fun. I send an ad to everybody based on their birthday, and it’s one of our ads that tends to re-engage our audience quickly. It’s me singing happy birthday being a dork singing happy birthday.

That’s awesome. What are some of the fun stories of engagement that you want to share about that particular ad? I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of positive comments from recipients of that.

People just love to be celebrated. If you celebrate your audience and not ask, just be like I love you. How many people don’t hear someone say I love you? How many people wish does a company care about? When you’re marketing, and you’re just ROAS, I want conversions, and I want to call to action, you’re missing the heart of your customer. Your customer’s just going to shrivel up on the inside. 

But if you tell your customer, I truly love you, I truly care about you, I’m truly here for you, and they know it, they can tell if you’re genuine or not, and they truly know, then they tend to convert later. That’s one of the reasons why I have the birthday ad is just to celebrate them and tell them that they’re pretty awesome.

That’s great. What would be some of the viral techniques you’re using and teaching your students to use that help build that audience organically?

One of the easiest things is to reflect your audience exactly who they say they are. When people engage in the content on social media, generally, they comment on posts that make them look good. They’re engaging in something that makes them feel good. They share something that makes their life better, that they feel will make them increase their status in the world. Increase who they are, and demonstrate who they are to others.

Every time that somebody comments, likes, and shares, it is usually visible to at least one other person, if not masses of people.

Remember, every time that somebody comments, every time somebody likes, every time somebody shares, all of that is usually visible to at least one other person, if not masses of people. 

If your content, let’s say, is debt relief, let’s say you’re a business that is like, how to get people out of debt. If you make a post, ten ways to get out of debt fast. If someone tags their friend in that post, that’s not going to make them look good, that friend looks good, it’s not going to make them feel good, it might make their life better, but do you think they’re going to take action on it or will they be like, bug off, I can’t believe she just publicly tagged me on this post about debt relief.

As a person, it’s not that they’re being tagged, but if they commented, what would their mother-in-law think about them? What would their community say if they saw that? That post is not ever going to go viral. It might be good, after they’re on your list, to convert them into a buy. But when they first see you, you don’t want the first time that they see you be, get out of debt. They’re going to block and ban you. 

Here’s the other thing, if they just scroll your ad, that hurts your ad ranking. You don’t want an ad that somebody sees and just scrolls past fast because it gives them a nasty taste in their mouth.

What do you do if you’re in a niche like deft relief and trying to get people to engage with your brand, get people to feel loved, get people to look good, and collect the audience of people who are now going to trust you? One of my students did this well, Amanda Texiera, and she posted, “It’s a good day at Costco when you go to Costco, and you leave with a kayak and a year’s supply of toilet paper.” The person who laughs at that is somebody who’s made impulse buys before. The person who’s made impulse buys probably has debt issues.

She’s now collecting her audience with something that makes them look good, feel good, and have a good life. People are tagging, “It wasn’t a kayak, I bought a five-foot tall bear, and we still have it. My daughter loves that thing.” 

The person replying is her perfect customer, and she doesn’t make them look bad. Now she’s able to collect that audience. She’s able to celebrate them even in their struggle, and she’s able to say hey, next time you go to Costco, and you’re about to leave with a whole van full of crap, let’s go through some strategies that can help you.

Now, she doesn’t feel like the bad enemy talking to them about debt relief, and she’s coming alongside them as their friend. They now trust and love her and are more willing to purchase her products and programs.

Makes a lot of sense.

That went viral. That post about Costco went viral. It built her company, too. It was awesome.

Was that a video post, or was it just a still image?

It was a meme. One of those text images. It’s just a picture with text is written instead of an actual picture, but it was uploaded like a photo. Photo posts are still going crazy. Right now, reels are doing well, but also the photo memes are going bunkers right now.

What are you seeing as the most effective or the most innovative reels these days?

There are a lot of different strategies, and you can do stitches, you can do where you have a trend and some fun dances. One of the things I love is green screens because they’re a great way for your audience to see your product. I like to do unboxing, and a lot of times, we think of unboxings as only for physical products. But I love seeing a coaching program unbox what is included in their program. There are a lot of great ones out there. There are probably too many to say to be honest. There are lots of different strategies you can use for reels.

What I always suggest to people is don’t necessarily listen to me saying what type of reel to do because every audience is different. What a cat person is looking for in a reel is very different from the mom trying to get out of debt. This is also very different from the small business owner trying to help the financial institution help the mom get out of debt. The type of content that will work for each of them is very different. It’s not one blanket that fits. The best thing you should do as a marketer is looking at what your audience is engaging with.

Reels are doing well, but the photo memes are also going bunkers right now.

What content do they like, what content do they share, and what content do they talk about? And don’t just look at what you think they would do professionally, go open up their profiles. Because then, you’ll see what their motivations are in their hearts. Let’s say you’re a company that sells software to universities across America, and the person buying this is the dean’s assistant in the education office or whatever. You’re going to go and look at what that dean’s office person put on their profile.

They put pictures of vacations, and they put pictures of their kids. They put pictures of the school mascot doing something funny. What all of those things, you’re going to want to incorporate into your content in some little way. That way, they feel like they know you, love you and trust you because you’re reflecting who they are through your content.

What would be an example of utilizing a school mascot in a meme or some sort of reel in a way that gets their attention and interest, and it’s not just whatever?

If you’re targeting a specific college, what color is their college? That’s the color you’re going to post your content in. We don’t have to overthink it, but they automatically trust someone—people from Clemson, a family member’s going to Clemson, and it’s bright orange. It’s the one university I remember as orange. If I start posting in orange, she will automatically trust me more. I don’t have to say, Clemson, I just use orange, and she’s like, we’re sisters and good.

Would you have a dark post where it’s the same post that you’re targeting Clemson alums and Clemson students with an orange color scheme, and for the University of Michigan alums and students, you’re using blue and yellow? Is that some of the stuff you’re doing?

I have done or coached people to do that if they work with the same niche in multiple areas. Typically, I don’t make an ad for every angle because it’s just too many ads, and we dilute the power of our marketing when you spread it too thin. The only exception is, let’s say, you’re training a golf course, you have software or social media, or you’re an agency that helps golf courses all over America, then yes, you’re going to have the same content, but you’re going to do different skins for it.

You make the same post, but the picture in the background will be different for the golf course in Arizona than it is in the golf course in Florida it is in the golf course in Michigan. Because the one in Michigan might have snow in it occasionally, the one in Arizona will have cacti in the background and palm trees will be in the Florida one. However, it’s still the same content because it is a golf course, and they’re all selling wedding packages.

Got it.

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There are times you want to tweak, but generally, try to stick to tried and true content.

Let’s say that you are marketing or selling golf courses, how do you find the communities of golf course owners on Facebook to learn what their preferences are and what they engage with? Are you going on their Facebook groups and searching within Facebook for groups about owning a golf course or what?

Usually, with that type of business, I would use Facebook groups, but I would also use LinkedIn, combine both, and I probably even use Reddit. Because you can find subgroups on Reddit of golf course owners, and then you can find the subgroups on LinkedIn of golf course owners. I would give the lead magnet to all of those places until I have a thousand people collected on a lead, then I would feed into Facebook and say, I would love to talk to you if you’re a golf course owner. I would say the same thing on LinkedIn and the same thing on Reddit and then ask them where they are. What groups are you in?

Because you’re not necessarily going to find that group if it’s a private group, you need to get an introduction to it. Usually, I start with knowing someone. If you’re starting, I don’t know anyone at all, and then I try to create those relationships on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Discord, too, if you can get into it. Also hashtags, but then once you get a golf course owner that you can talk to, literally get them on the phone and be like, where do you hang out, once you have five or six people that you’ve met that are that perfect avatar and can ask them where they hang out, then go join those groups and then I usually off LinkedIn and get Reddit and Discord.

Got it. Let’s say you’ve created a list of a thousand folks, you have their email addresses, they’ve opted in for your lead magnet, these are likely to be golf course owners, and you’re going to set that up as a custom audience in Facebook and then start putting ads in front of them or what’s the next step once you have that thousand email list?

The person with the golf course wanted to get people onto calls so she could become their social media manager and then sell them software to help them manage their marketing for their golf courses and run their websites and everything. What she did was she came up with a lead magnet for those people, and she put it into those areas. The lead magnet was just a massive giveaway. I don’t remember what it was. Her goal was not to get them into an ad, her goal was just to get them into a conversation with her, so she could say, “can I show what I’ve been up to?” She would get them onto phone calls. Once she had them on phone calls, she would convert them to become her customers for her marketing agency.

Okay, got it.

I stick to my time zones whenever I promote to ensure my list is cleaner.

I don’t think she did a whole lot of ads to grow her agency. I don’t think she did very much at all. She used conversation ladders. The tactic I teach is where you ask people a question, and then the people who comment on you engage with them and say, “can I take this further with you?”

Where do joint ventures, partnerships, or affiliate relationships fit in?

It’s funny you say that because I have one right here on the camera, I have one that’s like a reminder to me that I need to promote a friend, but yes, affiliate relationships, I think of them as gravy. Wherever there is a gap in my marketing, and there’s a complementary product, I should put it out there and share it with my audience. It increases the value for my people, but it also increases the relationship with that other company. Sarah’s program is one that’s next on my list to promote. 

Affiliate partnerships, I found it depends on the affiliate if the leads are good. I’ve had some affiliates send crap traffic because their list is not as cleaned up as mine. One thing I do with affiliates is block countries whenever I get the list, and I scrape it for what time zones people are in. I try to stick to just my time zones whenever I promote. That way, I can make sure the list is cleaner. That’s one of the things I’ve done to clean my list whenever affiliates give me traffic.

I tend to use affiliate traffic. One thing I love to do with affiliates, especially if they are a good converting audience, is let’s say I’ve done this, I promoted two different peoples’ programs in the past, actually, three of them in the past, each of their programs are $2000 a piece. I know that person’s a qualified buyer. If they’ve bought their programs, they’re also more likely to buy mine. What I’ve done is I’ve collected those people into audiences. I know if they purchased Russel Brunson’s, that they’d purchased Jeff Walker’s, if they purchased Ryan Levesque’s program, all three of them I’ve been affiliated with, they’re also more likely to buy my program.

Once I have 700 people that have bought click funnels using my link, guess what I can do? I can combine that with the 400 people who purchased Jeff’s and Ryan’s program, and now I have an audience of 1,000 people I can stick into Facebook and say, find me more people like this. What I love about doing that is it doesn’t just give me click funnels people, because sometimes click funnels aren’t the perfect audience for me because frankly, they’re like, we’re men, which is awesome, but my audience tends to be like, we’re a mom. It’s a slightly different audience, but by mixing the three and then saying I just want women, I tend to get a great audience that I can put nurture content in front of and grow.

I’ve used affiliates, one, to make money, two, to build my audience because they also promote me often, and thirdly, to create a solid lookalike audience to grow my business. Hopefully, that helps.

Yeah. What does a nurture campaign look like to an audience look like to an audience like that where you’ve asked Facebook to find you lookalikes? Are you putting memes in front of them every week? What’s the frequency, type of content, and over what period?

We have the same nurture sequence for everyone, no matter how they come to me and who they are.

We have the same nurture sequence for everyone, no matter how they come to me and who they are. It starts with what we call the sorting hat, which allows you to buy our lower ticket products, they’re all $27 apiece, and you all will be given an ad, an ad for the next, and one week of selling, one week off of just content to give, one week of selling, one week off. After about six weeks of that, if you haven’t purchased from us, you’re dumped into our year-long sequence, where you’ll get two emails from us a week for the rest of the year.

If you haven’t bought anything within six months, we will put you back in the sequence again to be sold. After a year, generally, people buy from us, not at first. They tend to buy from us about four to five months into our sequence. Yes, we get a bunch at the beginning, but we also get a bunch the second time they see the ads.

After six months, if you haven’t engaged, we start to—if you’ve opened, then we might keep you for the rest of the year, but if you haven’t opened in six months, usually, you’re long gone. If you’ve opened but not purchased, and it’s been a year, you’re gone from our list.

I take it you’re a Harry Potter fan.

No, my team called it the sorting hat. I’ve got an amazing team, and they help support me.

Yeah, and why is it called the sorting hat?

Because when they come in, it depends on what lead they came in on or what they were interested in as to where they go into the hat. If they click and watch one video, they’re tagged in our backend system that they’ve engaged on this video or came in on this lead magnet. That tells us that they’re interested in these different topics. We don’t have to survey our audience before we know something about them. We know that if somebody engaged in organic selling and didn’t want to buy anything about organic selling, we might want to be able to sell them our ads program.

If they’ve engaged in our organic selling, they might be interested in our group’s program and how to sell with a Facebook group. We just test them and say, and they came in on organic selling, they didn’t buy organic selling, which of these two would they like? They saw the group’s email come in, and they didn’t open that email. But they did open the ads email. Now, here’s ads, here’s evergreen sales, here’s better sales funnels, we give them a different experience depending on what they click. It took a little work to set it up, but now, that has worked, and it’s pretty cool.

Do you teach your students how to build that, too, or is that something that’s more part of your secret sauce?

Everything I teach is public knowledge in the sense that I give it all away.

Everything I teach is public knowledge in the sense that I give it all away. I tell people not to do that until they’re in the multiple six-figure ranges because it’s not worth the effort. 

Until then, just create a 52-week nurture sequence. After 52 weeks, then add your sales sequence, then add this next level. Then add an upsell. We have a system, so that way, you’re not overloaded. Start with the thing that will make you the most money right off the bat.

What does a high-ticket client look like for you? What’s your ideal client avatar for a high ticket, what kind of price point, and what do they get?

I don’t sell high tickets.

Don’t you? Okay.

I stopped. Nothing, I’ve nothing for them. I upsell them into other people’s programs at this time, so I’ve been building a software product, and I let my high-ticket people go, and they took more time. I love that I can just automate other parts of the business. I’ve automated almost all of it to build a software company, and I am an affiliate now for other people’s high tickets. It’s been fun because I don’t have to do the fulfillment.

What’s been the most effective or popular of the campaigns you’ve put out or the programs you’ve promoted for your affiliates?

Right now, I’m part of Master Hackers, which is a mastermind, that’s when I’m having fun promoting. I’ve done one for a local high-ticket program. That one has also done well, and I think we got seven or eight people into it. It depends on the person as to what she does well. If you know your customers, you can say you have $30,000 and want to invest in a high-ticket product. Here are the three I’ve been part of and what I love about them. Which do you think would be a better fit for you?

That’s a much easier sell than here’s the product I want to sell, and here’s why you should have it. I tend to tailor it to the people when it’s a high-ticket item.

You’re playing a lot with AI these days. What are some things that you think our listener would benefit most from using, let’s say, ChatGPT or some other particular platform, Gasper or whatever? What do you find to be the low-hanging fruit for our listeners?

Bizzy.ai is the AI platform I’ve built, and it will build your sales page, emails, and ads in 15 minutes or less. What I think is better than Jasper or ChatGPT is that you can type into ChatGPT and give me headlines. Then you’re like, give me more headlines, then I want the sub-headlines, then I want this. You can even say write me a sales page, but then you don’t know how to put that next to the image, and you don’t know how to format it. It’s not written like a sales page, and it’s just a copy. What if you got the copy already outlined? Here’s the headline that you’re going to put in the email. Here’s the headline you’re going to put in your preview. Here’s the outline of your email, the entire thing, here’s a long form here and a short form if you want a short form.

Here’s that same email in an ad. Now your audience has consistency. They saw your email, and now they have seen your ad. They all go to the same sales page. It also has an upsell page that connects right to it. Here’s then 15 social media post ideas that also have that same theme. You’re not having to piecemeal in ChatGPT to make it say everything you want it to, it’s given to you in one click. That’s what I’ve been building, and it’s pretty cool. I like it. We built it for ourselves.

We started building it 18 months ago before ChatGPT was a thing. We built it originally for ourselves because we were creating lots of different products across all my businesses, and I needed something that would allow me to scale it. I was making these templates, and we created ways to make the templates work with AI. Now, we’re able to build stuff much faster.

Nice. Good luck with that.

Thank you, it’s been fun.

When are you officially mega-launching that one?

I don’t think we’ll be mega-launching it for a long time. Advisors have told us that with software, you want to slowly let people in because you find bugs as you scale. We let our first 150 people in. Most likely, we’ll be adding 25 to 100 people every week until they give us the green light, and then we’ll do a launch. I’ll probably have about two weeks’ notice. I guess that it will be in the early summer, but maybe the bugs will be fixed sooner. We’ll find out.

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Awesome.

I don’t think we would be doing a big launch, probably ever, because it’s going to be evergreen, so there’s not going to be the scarcity, as in, don’t buy it other than the price is going to go up potentially. Still, it’s not going to have a scarcity component. It will be harder to have a proper launch, other than here it is for the world to sign up. It won’t be a PLS-style launch or anything like that.

What do you charge for it?

$27 a month for the lowest level program.

Cool. All right. If our listener or viewer wants to, in addition, check out your AI software, what if they’re going to follow you or learn from you, take some of your lower ticket programs? Where should we send them?

My Facebook group is called Grow Your Audience. I would love to have them hang out with me there, or they can message me on Facebook. I love answering people’s questions. I love talking to people. Let’s talk.

Awesome. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, listener. I hope this has been inspiring and motivating for you, and you’re going to go out there and build an incredible audience of passionate people that you help, and they help the world. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Build an emotional connection by sharing personal stories, encouraging interaction, and fostering a sense of community around my brand.

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About Rachel Miller

Rachel Miller is a lifetime learner, a mom to six kiddos, and a serial business builder. After growing her audience to over 4.4 million people and bringing in over $10M in revenue from those audiences, Rachel now helps other businesses grow engaged audiences for their brands without ads. She has helped over 28,000 businesses, helping them get their content in front of people organically, without ad spend!