Make Millions by Mastering Funnels with Lloyd Irvin

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Hey everyone. Welcome to another exciting episode of Marketing Speak, I am Stephan Spencer your host, and today we have with us, Lloyd Irvin. Lloyd is a phenomenon at Internet marketing and at martial arts. He started with martial arts. He’s actually a world champion, Sambo national champion. Am I saying that correctly?

Sambo national champion, yes.

Sambo national champion and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Yeah, this guy is dangerous. He’s also a very gifted and talented Internet marketer. He went from just the very beginnings to creating a very successful multi-million dollar online and offline business through internet marketing, multiple businesses in fact. Now he teaches others how to build up their own empires by using Internet marketing techniques and strategies. Lloyd, I met him not too long ago, what was it, maybe six months ago at a super-affiliate conference run by Greg Davis and Lloyd spoke there, just gave an awesome, inspiring talk. I wanted to share him and his brilliance with you, my listeners, so that you can also benefit. He’s a big fan of Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich, so I’m sure we’ll cover that at some point during the discussion as well. Yeah, so with that welcome Lloyd.

How are you doing? Thanks for having me.

You bet. I’m so happy to have you on this call. Let’s start by, if you could share a little bit about how you went from no Internet marketing experience to really crushing it through online marketing to get your MMA school, Brazilian jiu-jitsu school, to really crush it, in terms of sign-ups and so forth.

Most people gravitate to what they’re good at.

In a nutshell, it started out, you know, when I got out of college I stopped playing football and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. I was 26 years old and one of my fraternity brothers gave me the Ultimate Fighting championship DVD, and says, “Lloyd you have to watch this.” I watched it and I saw this little Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy from Brazil named Royce Gracie just destroy people with this martial arts that I’d never even heard of, that I’d never even seen before and I just fell in love with it and after that I just, like I said, I just had a love of martial arts since I was a child. I started martial arts when I was 3 years old. When I got to college I had stopped. I found this new love of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts. I wanted to be a UFC fighter.

Of course, like you said, when I was talking about once you kind of figure out what you want to do, most people gravitate to what they’re good at. I got involved in martial arts, I was good at martial arts. I found in 1996 in Rockville, Maryland, the head of a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school and I started training. Six months into my training he had to go back to Brazil for some reason, and I was basically left without an instructor. I had no money, and he basically said, “You might as well open your own school. Do the best you can with what you learned so far.”

I opened a school and that started doing good because I could pay the rent. The rent was only $300 a month. I moved to a bigger location, moved to $1200 a month, and next thing you know Billy Blanks Tae-Bo hit and we ran an ad and had about 500 women in the next 90 days and we moved to a 5000 square foot facility. As you know, when the Billy Blanks Tae-Bo craze hits and everyone has fitness resolutions, 30, 60, 90 days in the resolution goes away. We didn’t have contracts or agreements, so I went from a 5,000 square foot space with 500 plus students to a 5,000 square foot space with about 30 students. I couldn’t pay the rent, and things got bad real fast. I received an e-mail, and I’ll never forget this. It said, “Would you like to discover how to create an additional $100,000 income into your martial arts school in the next 12 months?” Where I was in my life, I was like, “Oh, most definitely for sure.” I read that e-mail and at the end of the e-mail they were selling some online course for like $299 or $399. I borrowed a credit card from my mom and I ordered this course. The course came to me through a digital download. I started reading the material, it started talking about how to set up your website, how it should be set up to be a lead generation machine and building a list. At that point I never heard of Aweber, I never heard any autoresponder to that, I didn’t even understand the concept of list building.

If you think about, I just graduated from college with a business degree with a concentration in marketing, so for me not to know these basic things were kind of incredible. Long story short, I started implementing some of the stuff I learned from the course and I was able to increase my income at my school from $3,000 a month to around $6,000, and then it went up to $9,000, $10,000. As it continued to progress I was so amazed at the turn around that I was able to make and what I was doing online that I wanted to dig deeper.

I made a decision right there and then that I’m going to learn everything that they teach, I’m going to implement everything that they teach.

I was introduced to a marketing mentor through this program, I signed up for that. I joined that. I got those newsletters and then I started making more money. Learned about cultivating businesses, cultivating the list building, different segmenting your lists, and offline mailing, offline mailing postcards, letters, copywriting. It just opened up an entirely new world. Next thing you know, I’m at thirty, forty thousand dollars a month. I’ll never forget this guy, sent an e-mail out one day, said, “If you want to learn how to do online marketing, there’s an event in Cleveland, Ohio by a master named Ken McCarthy.” Ken and I are very good friends to this day. I went to that event, this was 2003. What I learned at that event changed my life forever. It just opened my eyes to the whole world of Internet marketing. I’ll never forget the very first day at the event, Ken came out and said, “Just to show the power of Internet marketing – anyone that’s making $100,000 a year purely online, not offline business, just online, stand up.”

You gotta remember there’s about 400, 500 people in the room and I looked back and it was almost 100 people standing up. He said, “Let’s take it up again. If you’re making over $250,000 a year online, purely online, stay standing.” People started sitting down and I look back and once again, it was like 40, 50 people standing. He said, “Let’s take it up two more times. If you’re making over a half-million dollars a year online stay standing.” More people sat down, I look back. Still, a lot of people standing. Then he said, “Let’s take it up one more time. If you’re making over a million dollars a year online, stay standing.”

When I looked back, it was like one of those movies. Do you know how you have the movies when it’s a slow-motion scene and the camera’s just circling around them like they’re having a vision? I had that vision. I looked back and I was like Lloyd you know, you already said thinking over time, heavily, I’m a heavy believer of Think and Grow Rich, but at that moment it was like all the stars and moons aligned for me. It was like, I’m here to get this information. I was asking myself, what’s the difference between me and them? I mean these were regular guys. Some guys were former dentists or carpet cleaners and all kinds of weird things. They were selling weird stuff. It wasn’t like anything special because you have the people that you’re about to get rich quick on the infomercials, pay 19.99 and we’ll give you five web plays that’ll make you $1,000,000. It wasn’t anything like that. It was like real people that were just selling products online.

If you want to be the king, you need to have your own list and your own products.

I made a decision right there and then that I’m going to learn everything that they teach, I’m going to implement everything that they teach. Like I said, what’s the difference between me and them? I went there with a goal of creating a six-figure income over 12 months. At the time I was really into making multiple streams of income and if I could learn online marketing. I had my martial arts school as my first income stream, and now if I could have a second income stream online, that could make six figures. That’d be my second one and I could move forward. I can go deeper if you want, but that was the start and that event, at the end of three or four days I left there, I created my website, I created my widget, I started building opt-ins and from there I released my first product. I did $180,000 in my first day. It was amazing for me when my goal was $100,000 in the first year and I did $180,000 in the first day.

That’s awesome. What was it that was the magic behind going from no sales online to $180,000 at the end of day one? Was it joined venture partners who e-mailed their lists for you? Was it earned media or paid media or a combination? What was the primary driver of all that?

The primary driver of the very first $180,000 in a day was my own list. One of the speakers at the event said, “You can make lots of money in Internet marketing. You can make money by having your own list and having your own products and keeping 100 percent of all your money that you make. Or you can be on the sidelines and build a list and promote affiliate offers and you can make a percentage off of selling other people’s products, which is good.” He said that if you want to be the king you need to have your own list, and have your own products so you can, one, make 100 percent of your own sales then and there and two if you decide to go into the affiliate game, you can also make a percentage of selling other people’s products and selling other people’s products to your list. That’s the best position to be in.

I locked into that and so my entire goal was to create my own product but at the same time, I met a guy named Perry Marshal who was like, who is still like the king of Adwords. I set up a Google Adwords account at that event, like I didn’t even have an Adwords account. I created my ad on the first break, started running traffic and I started building a list. The very first day was actually based on proper communication with my list, proper education of the list and then finding a offer that they were interested in and making the offer and make it irresistible. That’s what resulted in $180,000. Understand at that time I still didn’t really know what I was doing, I just followed a basic plan. Build a list, build a relationship with that list, communicate with that list, find out what that list wants, and I did that through surveys, finding out what that list wanted, where there pain was and what they wanted, and then create a product that can help solve that pain.

Awesome. Frank Curran says, the money is in the list, if you don’t have a list you are really missing out. You built up a really valuable list and then you were able to monetize that through a successful campaign. Did you follow any kind of particular launch formula? Did you go through like Jeff Walker’s product launch formula? Did you use somebody else’s formula or did you just kind of wing it?

Well at this time Jeff Walker, I didn’t know who he was, I don’t think he had the product formula out at the time. I basically winged it. There was a guy named John Reese, he was a phenomenal marketer, he had released a product called Traffic Secrets and I watched that, I actually purchased it and I kind of modeled what he was doing as far as the opening the pre-emails and then going down to a close date. Like I said, I modeled John Reese’s Traffic Secrets. Other than that I just winged it. I didn’t have any campaign set up, I didn’t sit down and write all the e-mails for the opening, the middle and the close. Every single day I would figure out what I wanted to do today and then I would write that e-mail and send it. There was no segmentation or, like everyone got everything whether they opened it or not.

Got it. Nowadays, you’re probably using a more sophisticated system on the back end for doing these campaigns, the follow-up sequences and that, I would imagine?

Oh yeah. It’s crazy what can be done. When I say crazy I mean absolutely crazy. With the technology, with API, you have all these different CRM systems that people are using, and they have all these different outside apps that can be connected to APIs that can do stuff that, I mean some of the stuff even to this day I can’t even imagine. I mean I can’t even believe some of the stuff. I just got a new app called, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s an app that basically on the fly as people are opt-ing into my CRM and going onto my list, I am automatically on the fly changing the custom audiences to change what Facebook ads they see based upon their action. If I send an e-mail out to you today, and you’re on it and one custom audience on Facebook, if you click on a link and land on a different page through one of my e-mails, the ad will automatically change what you’re seeing now based upon where you are throughout my campaign. It’s just absolutely sick.

The money is in the list, if you don’t have a list you are really missing out.

What we’re doing now is, we sit down, we plan out the entire campaign, set it up, set up all the automation, put people in it, and then press the button to go and then just watch the numbers. Of course there some things you may be able to do on the fly.

Wow, that’s awesome. You’re using Facebook as a significant channel for driving in traffic. Is that mostly cold traffic where they haven’t heard of you before? Is it mostly traffic where it’s a retargeting audience that you’re remarketing to? How’s that working?

Most of the stuff that we’re doing in the businesses and our businesses and working with other clients are mostly working towards cold traffic, because the system and the science is once you can learn how to convert cold traffic you’re in the money. A lot of people it’s like once you build your list, you have your own list, if they trust you and like you and you have something that they want, they’ll usually make a purchase decision whether one month in, two months in, a year in, depending on how long your sale cycle is. The major focus is converting cold traffic, turning them warm and then, of course, making them hot. We also do work, of course, we work with our own custom audiences, then we work with look-alike audiences that are very similar to our regular audience, but converting cold traffic is where it’s at.

Yeah, what would be some metrics for comparison? If I am just starting out with Facebook advertising, I’m paying whatever and getting whatever number back how do I gauge whether this is good or bad or kind of middle of the road?

All right, so I have a, one con of me I’m not a super-duper metrics guy, I’m really into the ROI. I should be a metrics guy, I just never got into it, that’s not my forte. When I outsource these things they get into it, but I’m more so – I’ll give you an example. One campaign we’re running right now, we’re getting an opt-in at about $2.40 per opt-in, so the average ticket sale is $1,300 to $2,500 so there’s like usually like 70, 80 percent people are coming in at the $2,500 mark, so at $2 I can spend $1,000 and drive in X amount of leads to get one sale.

When I say one sale, I mean it’s $2,500 on the front end, not counting the back end money. The back end money is usually probably around $25,000 additional over a period of 12 months. Just on the front end, so as long as I can put $1 in and make $1.10 back, $1 in make $1.50 back, I’m just going to keep on spending, it’s about how much money can I spend and how much traffic can I buy? Sometimes depending on what markets you’re in, what niches you’re in, there are some people that have unlimited funds but can’t buy that much traffic because they’ll be running out of traffic within that niche. It’s that serious.

Once you can learn how to convert cold traffic, you’re in the money.

In the case of, let’s say, you’re going to do an event, like a three-day event, teach a seminar, you could just even break even and not make a profit and that’s okay because you’re going to sell on the back end $25,000 masterminds or private coaching or group coaching and easily double or triple your money versus the ticket prices that you’re selling, the kind of general admission, starting them into working with you, correct?

Oh, 100 percent. Back in the day in 06, 07 my wife and I had a company that we were running on radio, we were spending like thirty, forty thousand dollars a month on TV. We were spending twenty, thirty thousand dollars a month to generate traffic and generate leads through online and through calls. It was interesting, even back then, even now people pick up the phone actually call more than they do go online, but very, very few people actually focus and actually providing a phone number for people to call. You can go in a hole, like proactive, they go in a hole three to four months before they come out of the hole, because they know they’re going to – the life cycle of their customer. When you can do that and you understand your metrics on the back end, it puts you in a powerful situation.

On the back end of your website you have a CRM system. Is it like infusionsoft or Ontraport or ActiveCampaign or what sort of technology is behind the scenes?

Behind the scenes I’m using infusionsoft, I’ve been with infusionsoft since, I was one of the beta guys. I’ve played around with Ontraport and I’ve heard about ActiveCampaign but I haven’t used them. When it’s all said and done, infusionsoft is the best of the worst and like I said, I’ve had a good relationship with Clayton’s brother, and I’ve been happy.

Yeah, it’s nicknamed confusionsoft for a good reason. It’s pretty complicated and so having a really good infusionsoft implementer kind of managing things behind the scenes, building out the campaigns and follow up sequences is really critical. What would be one of the differentiators when you’re using technology such as infusionsoft or Ontraport or whatever, what’s one of the differentiators from just kind of the basic beginner who’s sending out an e-mail blast and somebody such as yourself who’s much more strategic in the way that you implement you campaigns, the way that you follow up and so forth? You kind of alluded to this in example with the custom audience and changing the ad depending on where they’re at inside of your website, whether they’ve gotten to a thank you page or something like that. What would be another example of a strategic way to kind of deal with these clients that are coming to your site?

Well, probably one of the things that is basic at an advanced level that most beginners aren’t doing is that everything that you do once a lead comes in is based upon what actions that lead takes within your sale funnel. You have to create a sales funnel, so you opt-in, you’re interested in product A and my first e-mail I send to you I have seeded links in there asking you different questions, if you’re interested in this or are you interested in that, click here, click there. Based upon where they click it will launch and start an entire new campaign that’s 100 percent entirely set up based upon – Let me use a martial arts example. Right now we’re promoting for our summer camp, and it can be anything that I’m selling like coaching products still but I’ll use the martial arts group. Right now, when a parent comes in and they opt in to find more information about our summer camp, we have an if your child is between the ages of three and five click here, if it’s between the ages of seven and nine click here, if their age is between ten and thirteen click here. When they click here it now sends them to a page that everything on that page, so say they click three- to five-year-old, everything on that page is talking about a three to five-year-old. Every e-mail video testimonial in that campaign is going to be a parent with a three- to five-year-old.

One of the things that is basic at an advanced level that most beginners aren’t doing is that everything that you do once a lead comes in is based upon what actions that lead takes within your sale funnel.Lloyd Irvin

If they click ten to twelve year old then all the video testimonies that we have in those campaigns will all be a parent with a ten- to twelve-year-old, as well as if there’s one single thing that we can do to help your child, what would you like to improve? They’ll say if they click here for confidence, click here for self-esteem, click here to teach them how to defend themselves against a bully. Whatever they click will launch the bully campaign. If they click want to lose weight, now they’ll go into my 33 e-mail lose weight campaign full of testimonials of parents that brought their child here to lose weight and so we’re going to be speaking specifically to them.

As well as it’s human nature, like if any time you’re selling something, any time you’re offering something people procrastinate. Basic sales 101 you always have to offer a deadline. If you know, like you said, Jeff Walker’s product launch, everyone that does anything with product launches at some point during your product launch you have to close the date, close the cart and set up a actual closing date. Well, what happens with infusionsoft and with these specific apps within these campaigns, you can have this on evergreen automated webinar, evergreen automated campaigns, so as they’re receiving these e-mails now there’s a countdown that’s happening. They think it’s a real countdown, they don’t understand that outside of this little world that they’re in right now, the infusionsoft campaign world, that the next person that comes in next week comes in and they’ll go through the same thing, and they’ll feel the countdown and the pressure.

What you’ll see is this. You’ll see 20 to 40 percent of your sales come in the last three to four days and then a big influx at the last day. Now, if you were to try to do this for every single opt-in that came into your website every single day it would drive you crazy and you definitely wouldn’t do it, but setting these up inside a CRM system and automated is the way to go. The vast majority of people that don’t even understand this can happen, and if they think about it they don’t know how to do it, and that’s like the difference between the beginners and the advanced guys.

For us, right now, understanding what the APIs are and having programmers, we have basically brain dumps. We come in and say, “Listen, in a perfect world if you were able to market and do anything that you wanted within the marketing campaign. I mean anything, think about your wildest dreams. What would it be.” Then we just brain dump. Then we go out and find out how to do it. I mean anyone using Facebook understands custom audiences. Being able to change the ads that people see on desktop and mobile on the fly based upon what they click on their mobile phone or inside their website, you understand how sick that is? Man, that’s crazy. Now you have to go and advance set up all the campaigns. You have to set up, get the ads written, get the images done. Set them up, but once you have that set up it’s on autopilot.

That’s brilliant. Are you using webinars to get people further down in your sales funnel?

Well, webinars aren’t really to get them further down. Webinars are to get them acclimated. Sometimes webinars are held in the front end just to get them more familiar with you and we know that we may not get the sale until one, two, three weeks after, or we may not get the sale. Like for high end coaching, like if you’re selling $25,000 $50,000 coaching programs, webinars are a great place to either get them fully understanding or on your boat like, wow, wow I would like to work with this person, show your expertise, or you can have other sequences that are trying to get the person to view you, to see you as an expert. Then at a later point drop them into the sequence where they go to a webinar. Webinars are good on the front end, they’re good on the back end, depends on what you want, what you’re interested in.

Do you like the kind of webinars that are prerecorded or the ones that are live, because if you do that kind of sequence with the countdown clock and everything to get people to act and get the urgency, scarcity thing going for a webinar it works really well. It’s hard to do this on a large scale basis if you’re going to be the one presenting a live webinar every week or multiple times per week. I know a number of Internet marketers are going with the prerecorded stealth seminar approach. What’s your take on that?

Basic sales 101 you always have to offer a deadline.

Well I like all of them but each one has a specific purpose. I use the automated webinars. I also do 100 percent live webinars as well. Then we do the hybrid where we do the automated webinar then we’ll come in for the last hour or thirty minutes and do Q and A. Sometimes without the Q and A, the Q and A can just bump sales ten, fifteen, twenty percent just from the Q and A. Say if you’re running an automated webinar, I have a friend who does it every single day. He has an automated webinar every day, he just comes in, so he works 30 minutes a day for that part of the business but he comes in and does it. If he doesn’t do it he has his assistants come in because the Q and A can either be just chat or it can be voice. He does both, so if he doesn’t want to be there or can’t be there, someone from his office can actually do the Q and A for him. When you’ve done it for awhile, you’ll find out 80 plus percent of the question are always going to be the same.

I like all of them, each one has a purpose. When you’re trying to indoctrinate somebody to a concept or a position or a position on you as an expert or an idea, you want to be able to do that on a regular basis, on an ongoing basis, so automated webinars are definitely something that have to be in the game. If there’s something you’re trying to sell right there and then or you want to sell it at a later point where people always have questions, like I said, that’s like a little hybrid.

At the same time, you’re also changing the automated webinars. If you start seeing a question being asked every single time you’re doing a Q and A, obviously your webinar’s not answering that question. Then you got to go in, create some new slides, answer that question, and if you do it correctly then you’ll start seeing that question not being asked on the Q and A. Different questions that are getting people off the fence or onto the fence or making a sale, you want to make sure you’re always adjusting, testing the webinar. You don’t want your webinar to be running all the time and always people have the same exact question, you should adjust that in the webinar. I don’t have one particular one, I use a mix of all of them.

Got it. All right. Are you also incorporating video into your sales process, like video sales letters or for video sequence for doing a product launch? Where’s video on this?

Webinars aren’t really to get them further down. Webinars are to get them acclimated.

Video is everything. I very rarely do anything without a video, so much that I don’t even test it sometimes. Sometimes I still go with a straight print. Then, like I told you, you have the front and you have the back end. Sometimes people are trying to make money, they get a person in they send them to a sales letter then the sales letter’s supposed to do the job. Well, they’ll still have questions. They still may not feel connected to you. The webinar may do it’s job but once they see the sales letter, they don’t buy right after seeing the sales letter, then we can drop them right into another sequence of four or five videos that are delivered over the next couple days. Each singular video has a singular purpose for the person to watch. Then, like I said, like you asked earlier what types of things can you do with the actual CRMs. With infusionsoft there’s different apps with WIST and so forth that you can actually know how much of a video a person watches. Say for example, if I’ve created four videos and if you watch three or four of these videos I know that I’m going to increase my chances of making a sale with you by 80 percent. What’s going to happen is if I send one e-mail out with video one and you don’t watch it, and then you go to video two you don’t watch it, you watch video three.

Well, you watch video three, but you don’t know what video one or video two was about. What I do with the system is I set it up that unless the person watches at least 50 percent of video one they’ll never even get sent video two. You can take it a step higher where if they don’t watch 80 percent of video one, they’re going to continue to receive emails pushing them to watch more. Say, for example, if you watch 50 percent of video one and then you stop watching. Then I’ll drop you into a sequence that is now saying, hey I hope you go video one. In video one it talked about this, this and that. I’m going to say two or three things that I know you already saw. Then say, but at the end of the video, at the seven twelve second and thirty-second mark I talk about one single thing that can double your conversions practically overnight. If you haven’t watched that please click video one and watch that. Then it will drive people back to watch more of the video. It works. Now once they hit the 80 percent mark then they later they’ll receive video two. If videos one, two, three, and four are all created to make sure that they increase the chances of making the sale, then it’s very important that they watch it. Without these types of apps and with these types of automation, you have no idea if a person watches it. Most people just set up four videos, if they do that, press send, and then they don’t know that people watch it or not. They make the sales that they made. If they made a lot of money they made a lot of money. If they made a little bit of money they make a little bit of money, but they don’t really know what happened. They just did it without using automation to do its job.

Yeah, but it’s not just automation, it’s the strategy behind it, really thinking through. What should happen if this person doesn’t take this next action? Then tracking, I know you say you’re not a metrics guy, but you actually are, because you’re thinking about what should I tag and what should I be paying attention to that’s going to get people to move further down the sales funnel? It’s impressive stuff. It’s not just about getting them to open your e-mail, it’s getting them to take some meaningful actions so that they move further down the funnel. That’s pretty awesome.

One hundred percent, yup.

You mentioned earlier on in our conversation you did surveys at the beginning to get an understanding of your customer, your potential client. How are you using surveys today?

When you’re trying to indoctrinate somebody to a concept or a position or a position on you as an expert or an idea, you want to be able to do that on a regular basis, on an ongoing basis, so automated webinars are definitely something that have to be in the game.Lloyd Irvin

Well, a survey is everything because it’s like being able to read your prospect’s mind. On the low level you just basically send out a basic email what’s the single most important thing you would like for me to show you or teach you or create videos for. You can tell them, say, “Hey I’m very excited, I’m going to have a birthday and I wanted to create some cool videos for you, but before I create the videos I want to find out what’s the single most important thing you would like me to create videos for you on, that you like to learn. If you do me a favor and answer this one single question.” You give them a widget or some type of gift and then if they know on the survey you’ll have question number one what’s the number one thing you like to learn, number two if there’s anything else you’d like to learn fill that in. Now that’s like a catch all bucket list. This is at a very simple level.

The next thing you know you start getting all these surveys in and now you say wow, I’m getting ready to make a video on list segmentation and they want to know how to make an opt-in box appear half way through the video. You know what I’m saying, like and if you didn’t know that then you wouldn’t have, you made a video that they weren’t really interested in.

Right, and you just keep throwing out these nuggets. I mean this is fabulous. A lot of people won’t even realize that this is a thing, that you can have an opt-in or a buy now button appear once the viewer has gotten to a certain point in the video, or in a webinar. This is really genius because if you combine urgency and scarcity with adding irresistible offers and bonuses and so forth and you just overwhelm them with this added value and then you present the buy button once you get to that critical juncture, sales will just, it’ll blow up for you.

Let’s take it to another level of the survey because the survey is so important. Now say for example, if you do a multiple question survey, so you say, you send out an e-mail and you’re asking your list, “Are you interested in list building? Are you interested in video creation? Are you interested in copy writing? Are you interested in whatever the things are? Now each person will select whatever they’re interested in. Well now not only are you getting a combination of what the list most likely wants, at the same time when they click that and submit order you’re now segmenting them onto a specific list for that.

Now say for example if I had four products I was really trying to market, but I didn’t want to market a product to someone who wasn’t interested in it. Now at the same time when they click and submit that survey that says they’re interested in list building, it drops them automatically into a list building campaign that’s going to try to sell a list building kit. If they click “want to learn how to use videos to sell” it drops them into a campaign that teaches them how to make videos to sell. You can do this. They won’t even know what’s going on, all of a sudden they’re receiving content and videos and training on stuff that they’re interested in.

If you apply principles from Think and Grow Rich to your daily life and to your business, the opportunity is limitless. These are just tools that are available at your disposal, whether it’s Stealth Seminar or Surveymonkey or infusionsoft or Instant Customer, that’s another great one I use that to get people to text instead of email, or go to a website when I’m giving a presentation at a conference or something, I’ll get them to text to get a Powerpoint deck or some other free bonus that I’m offering during my presentation. I get a higher response rate by getting them to text me instead. I use Instant Customer for that, but that’s all techniques. It’s really in the strategy and the mindset where it all begins. If you have a mindset for success and for being unstoppable, that’s where you’re going to just overcome whatever odds and whatever obstacles.

Let’s talk about Think and Grow Rich. I love this part because, it was very memorable for me when you were presenting on stage and you asked people who’s read Think and Grow Rich. A number of people had, this was a big audience. There were, I don’t know, 500 people or something. Then you asked people to name the thirteen principles, see I don’t even know the number. I could name some of them but I can’t name all of them. I think you had like $1000 or whatever it was. You said, “I’m going to give this to whoever can name the thirteen principles.” Nobody could do it out of the 500. I thought that was pretty mind-blowing for such an influential book and the number of years that it took for Napoleon Hill to write that book and to do the research in order to write that book and all the collective brilliance from Andrew Carnegie and Ford and everybody else who contributed their processes and mindset and so forth to go into that book. Yet nobody bothered to remember the thirteen principles, I thought that was pretty amazing. How have you implemented Think and Grow Rich and some specific ways in your business?

Well, when it comes Think and Grow Rich I literally took it like the bible of success. Like you just said, like over a twenty-year period Napoleon Hill interviewed and hung out with and researched with the assistance of Dale Carnegie the world’s richest most successful people and after twenty long years he boiled everything down to thirteen principles. He handed it to the world and it’s so powerful that the vast majority of the world has read it and many of the most powerful people in the world have contributed that Think and Grow Rich has played a major role in their life and so forth. At all marketing events, and Internet marketing events and success events, everyone Think and Grow Rich, Think and Grow Rich, Think and Grow Rich. I always heard it, but if someone hands you a blueprint of the world’s richest and most successful people, why wouldn’t you just follow it? I mean at the bare minimum understand what it is for success and at the bare minimum try to emulate it.

What I did, like you said, at that event I was really into Think and Grow Rich. I had memorized the thirteen principles, I was studying them, I was trying to mimic them as much as possible and at that point it was like I wanted to engulf myself into each principle. You think about just desire, and when you think about desire, I always tell the story about, like right now people say they want to be successful, people say they want to be rich, people say they want to do different things, but none of them really have a burning desire. You have to have a burning desire.

A survey is everything because it’s like being able to read your prospect’s mind.

Right now if there’s a car and there’s a parent driving with their kid and there’s a car accident and the mom gets thrown out of the car and she wakes up and she looks over and her son or her child is under a burning car, she’s not thinking, she’s running over there to get the car off or attempt to get the car off to save her child. She’s not sitting there thinking about, “hey it’s hot, oh could somebody help?” Mom don’t care about death right now. Mom has a burning desire to save her child. A desire so strong that she’s willing risk death, right?

Some people say, oh why you talking about death, why, that’s too serious. Well, it’s not really too serious. I mean being homeless is serious. Not being able to feed your child is serious. Not being able to have a shelter over your family’s head, that’s serious to me. People say, “I want to be successful” well, how successful do you want to be? Do you have, Think and Grow rich says one to be successful you have to have a burning desire for whatever it is that you want to do. Some people say they’re doing a job or they’re in a business they don’t really like, but the money’s so good and they have a burning desire to get the rewards of said income level. Or they may have a passion of the actual job that they’re doing or the business that they’re in, they have a burning desire. That’s like a desire.

The power of the mastermind, like when you got Ford and Carnegie and all these top-level minds coming together, two minds are better than one, three are better than two and understanding this concept. Like I said when I said earlier, I’m not good at metrics but I have friends that are. I’m not good at different things but I have friends that are. When some of the world’s richest most successful people they’re all about, listen I’m smart. Understand, I’m smart at what I am smart at, and I’m smart enough to bring people around me that are smarter than me and I’m not.

You start thinking about the MasterMind principle. Early on when I started joining masterminds and running mastermind programs it was very important to me because that’s what it’s about. It’s not about me, it’s about what Think and Get Rich said. You have to get the masterminds, you have to be around people that are smarter than you, you have to be around people that want to do the same things or have been where you are already.

Specialized knowledge. This is really passionate for me, because like I said, I went to college, graduated with a marketing degree, a business degree with a major in marketing, and a year and a half, two years into my martial arts school I’m getting ready to go out of business because I don’t know anything about business. I don’t know anything about sales. I don’t anything about lead generation. I don’t know anything about converting these leads. I don’t know anything about anything. Think and go Rich says, I think the book that I have it was on page 46, it says specialized knowledge is not the type of knowledge you gain from universities and/or colleges. It rang so true to me when I read that, when I hear it, because, like I said, I love my college days, I wouldn’t trade them for anything but actually I’m not making one single penny from anything that I learned from college. It wasn’t until I got out of college, got forced into owning a business, my martial arts school, and was getting ready to lose my martial arts school, and I was slam broke, that I gained what Think and Go Rich talks about as specialized knowledge.

Be around people that are smarter than you, you have to be around people that want to do the same things or have been where you are already.

I learned how to do Internet marketing. I learned how to do direct response marketing. I learned how to do about lead conversion and sales. It wasn’t until I learned that specialized knowledge that things in my life started changing. At the same time, I’m thinking, wow I just learned specialized knowledge. Things will change. I already have the burning desire. Things are changing. Then I started getting mentors. Things are changing. Like organized planning, so when you said sitting down with these marketing campaigns and product launches and using the CRM. If you think about that, think about Think and Go Rich, one of the thirteen principles are what, organized planning. If you going to market anything, and you going to have a constant flow of information going to a prospect to ultimately lead them to a sale, I mean, why not have organized planning? Think and Go Rich says one of the most common principles of the most successful and richest people in the world. When I think about sitting down and actually building these marketing campaigns, I’m just following the principle. I’m having the organized planning.

Like I said, the decision, I make fast decisions. I have fast implementations. Like I said, I can go step by step but every single principle in Think and Go Rich I follow and apply it to my life and apply it to the marketing. For me right now it’s really simple. It was difficult earlier, but if you think about it why is it difficult? Get the book, read the principles. Desire. Ask yourself, do you have a burning desire for what it is you’re doing right now. If you don’t then you’re probably not going to be successful in it, because the vast majority of people that are highly successful have a burning desire doing whatever it is that they are doing and/or to get the result of what they are doing.

If you have a burning desire, okay, do you have specialized knowledge in this area? A lot of people if you’re listening and you’re an internet marketer. Okay, you say, well you have a list and do you have an opt-in box and you have people coming in and you have products and you have a little sales page and you have a follow-up sequence for people who don’t buy the product and you have different campaigns. That’s fine, I mean that’s basic, basic level. Think and Go Rich says you have to have organized planning and you have to have specialized knowledge. Well, what knowledge do you have to go into advanced campaign marketing, advanced behavioral targeting, advanced video making? You know like you have to constantly improve.

Like I told you, we spoke before, I’ve been investing a lot, probably like $30,000 in the last 30, 60 days to learn some new specialized knowledge on web-casting and video-casting and doing live casting. I’m going to invest another thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars in equipment to be able to do that at the level that I want to do it. I have to put a team together. I still had to go out, sit in a room for three or four days, learning and studying. When I got back I’m in the membership site, watching 40, 70 hours of videos. I don’t really like it but I want this knowledge. I have to gain specialized knowledge, because marketing is going at a higher level.

Now, so right now, you’ll see people, that are doing e-mail marketing, internet marketing and they’re trying to not get you to a webinar, not get you to a telephone they’re trying to get you to a live telecast. You’ve been seeing it for the last couple years and where it’s really live and you’re answering questions live and there’s Q and A live chat. You’re watching them do this show and you’re asking them questions on the chat and they’re answering it live. I mean this is the next evolution. Some people in the next five years still won’t be doing it, in the next eight years still won’t be doing it. For me I’m just following these principles with this and everything I do. I see a new trend that’s not like a flashy object but that has sustainability. You think about live cast and what is it? It’s a form of what you can think about as web-casting or like a webinar or a teleseminar, but now instead of doing a webinar you’re doing a live show. You’re producing live quality shows. Taking what’s happening right now on TV and putting it live on the web. It’s an amazing thing, but like I said, it takes time to learn and that’s specialized knowledge. That’s what I’m out here to get.

Any time I see something that’s going to sustain itself, I want to go learn it. If I don’t want to learn it myself, I get somebody else, get someone on my team to learn it. We have a principle, if you want to be successful and there’s something that has to be done, either you have to do it or somebody else has to do it, but it can not be done. If I don’t want to do it, then I have to pay someone on my team have them go do it. If I don’t want them to do it then I have to do it, but it can not be done.

Yup. Yup. This last strategy you were mentioning of a live cast, for our listeners, just to differentiate this from just a regular webinar, this is an opportunity for folks to do a live show, or series of shows, almost like a telethon right? You have the opportunity to deliver lots of great content, in a telethon sort of environment instead of just, sign up for my 60-minute webinar, and so forth. Always new technologies, new opportunities, new innovations, and staying on top of that and building that specialized knowledge base is really critical. We’ve I think been drinking from a fire hose here for the last 50 minutes. I want to wrap up with one final question, one final take away for our listeners. If there is one thing that people must do, our listeners must do to take their marketing, their business to the next level, what would it be? Is there something that they could implement like next week? It’s not an onerous sort of thing but definitely very doable. What would that be?

Go into your list. Start segmenting your list based upon the list interest and then market it to those sub-niched lists, specifically for those interests. If you don’t have products that are boiled down for those interests, create the products and speak to – like if you come to a website and you’re interested in video sales and they’re trying to talk to you about opt-in boxes or product launches or anything other than video sales, it may lose your interests. People want to hear about and learn about, and get better at what they are interested in.

Most people that are building a list, they’re putting everyone into one big bucket list. Then they’re not segmenting or they are segmenting they’re still not creating products and/or services or education to talk to those specific lists. Every single week you should be creating new opportunities for people to opt-in for specific tools. Every single thing that we do or we look at these surveys, if there’s a topic that someone is interested in, that we’re starting to see on a regular basis that we don’t have any information on, we’ll create a new widget, we’ll create a new funnel, we’ll create a new campaign, we’ll shoot new videos so people can come through that path, so they can view us as experts at that as well.

When it’s all said and done, it’s just marketing. That person maybe coming into your funnel thinking that video sales are the end all be all just because they listened to some guru out here that said it, but you know if they don’t have a list, video sales don’t matter about anything. If I was to give one take away, it’s niching down, going into your list, segmenting your list and then speaking to your list specifically on what they’re interested in.

Makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you, Lloyd, this has been really illuminating I’m sure for our listeners and inspiring too. Next action I would recommend for all of our listeners if you haven’t read Think and Go Rich read it, or get the audiobook and listen to it. If you have read it again. Again, thank you very much Lloyd for joining us today and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Take care. Thank you.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Get started on a list.
Come up with an offer that your list can’t resist.
Try connecting with cold traffic.
Set up a funnel within InfusionSoft.
Give your users a deadline to responding to your message.
Try a hybrid-style webinar to save time while answering the questions that your leads need.
Set up a survey on your site to be able to read inside the mind of your target audience.
Join a mastermind and link up with other ambitious thinkers.
Have a brain dump with your team, and see what you can come up with to maximize the efficacy of your campaigns.
Never stop learning!

About Lloyd Irvin

Lloyd Irvin is a martial arts master turned online marketing sensation that brings the same technical skill and strategic mindset that he does as a Sambo national champion as he does creating these beautiful, intricate marketing funnels. We sat down to talk not only how that sort of transition from fighter to salesman happens, but how he found massive success with both of them.

Lloyd gives no less than a wealth of great funnel ideas and ways to implement campaigns that convert.